Introduction

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>> Spencer Schneidenbach: Welcome, I am so excited to be here today to talk to you about ASP.NET Core and building API at ASP.NET Core. My name is Spencer and I am gonna take you on a little bit of a journey. But first I'm gonna open up with just a little bit of a bold statement that I believe that.NET is the best platform for building web apps in the world.

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Now, I believe this because I've been writing software for about 15 years, and I have used a huge ton of frameworks, and the one that gives me the most joy, the one that I love writing every day, is still ASP.NET Core. Those are building APIs, and ASP.NET Core is still the thing that I have the most fun doing.

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A little bit about me, I am the President and CTO of Aviron Software, so we are a software consultancy that does primarily.NET development, so I was able to build this just mostly by doing.NET. We also do some react and Microsoft Azure and React Native mobile apps as well.

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I've been recognized for about ten years as a Microsoft MVP with my award category being in the development space, specifically ASP.NET Core, if you can believe that. And I have been a.NET consultant for my company's been around for about four years, but I've been a.NET consultant for probably almost all my career.

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I started out on a website similar to indeed.com, and when I got paid 75 bucks to write a stored procedure, I did it in like 15 minutes, and I was like, Okay, this is really cool. And I've never stopped being a .NET consultant from there, I've also spoken around the world at many conferences around about ASP.NET Core topics.

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And so the culmination of all of that experience went into building this workshop. So the goal here is to teach you how I build web APIs using ASP.NET Core and .NET. It's built from the ground up to be pragmatic, practical, you can take 99% of this code and apply it to your job, and the 1%, I will call out and tell you don't do this.

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But what I plan to do is take us on a little bit of a journey, so I'm going to take us to starting out from .NET New Project. I'm gonna build an API from scratch and what I'm gonna do from there is refactor it and slowly make it more complicated.

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I'm gonna show you tools and things about ASP.NET Core along the way that you'll use in your day to day. It's built from all of the experience that I have building APIs, real APIs in real production environments. Now, I wanna make sure that, make sure to let you know that there's no ivory towers, I'm not telling you that there's one true way to do things.

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These are the things that I have done in my career that have made helped make me successful and build really good APIs for my clients. I also believe in minimizing magic in code, and what I mean by that is that sometimes things just work and you don't necessarily understand why, I want to pull back that curtain a little bit.

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So as we go, I will be digging into the source code for ASP.NET Core here and there, just to kind of show you and get you used to it. I read source codes surprisingly a lot when, especially when debugging like nuanced issues. So the tooling that we use, will allow you to dig right into that, I do want to talk a little bit about why you should choose to use ASP.NET Core.

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First of all, there's a ton of jobs in the market, I have a consultancy, as I mentioned, I have about ten people. Four years ago I started myself by myself, and then three years later I had about eight people, and now I have 11 or 12 or so.

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So there's lots of jobs, there's lots of work to be done, there's lots of interest in the marketplace for ASP.NET Core specifically, I find that it's fun to use and write, I have always connected with .NET. It was my first programing platform, but after being exposed to all the other ones, I've connected with it the best I have, the most fun when I'm writing APIs for .NET Core.

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It's open source and cross platform, and I think that's really important, I get questions all the time. Isn't Microsoft closed source? Don't you have to have windows? I'm gonna be doing all of this development that you're seeing on a Macintosh. I don't use windows if I can help it, and I use.NET almost exclusively on a Mac.

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We have a strong developer, ecosystem as well, and what I mean by that is that there's a lot of people using the platform, so that means that, naturally, there's going to be a lot of people that contribute to that to that platform. There's a lot of open source projects, some of them that we will bring into our project to kind of help us do certain tasks.

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It's highly performant and scalable, it's modern and secure and backed by. One of my favorite tech companies in the world, which is Microsoft, and plays nicely with others. My favorite pairing for ASP.NET Core is React, actually. If I'm making a single page app, if I'm starting one from scratch, it's almost certainly gonna be React backed by ASP.NET Core.

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So as I mentioned, this course is designed to give you kind of my summation of my real world experience, this is how I build real APIs. We're gonna do source code deep dives, at least here and there, I'm gonna show you professional best practices, as well as show you a few things that I think you should avoid.

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And all of the examples are practical, so you'll be able to follow along, and we'll go into that here just a little bit. Last thing I'll say is that I'm pretty opinionated, if you watched my previous C sharp, course, none of this should be any of any surprise to you.

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However, when it comes to ASP.NET Core, I'm extra extra opinionated because this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you're actually going in and building production level applications is using this framework. So anything that you see That has the three chili peppers on it, that's my spicy take, and I have plenty of them.