Mark J. Price - Apps and Services with .NET 7: Build practical projects with Blazor, .NET MAUI, gRPC, GraphQL, and other enterprise technologies

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Early Access Publication: Apps and Services with .NET 7

Early Access Production Reference: B18857

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK

ISBN: 978-1-80181-343-3

Welcome to Packt Early Access. Were giving you an exclusive preview of this book before it goes on sale. It can take many months to write a book, but our authors have cutting-edge information to share with you today. Early Access gives you an insight into the latest developments by making chapter drafts available. The chapters may be a little rough around the edges right now, but our authors will update them over time.

You can dip in and out ofthis bookorfollow alongfrom start to finish; Early Access is designed to be flexible. We hope you enjoy getting to know more about the process of writing a Packt book.

1. Chapter 1: Introducing Apps and Services with .NET
2. Chapter 2: Working with Data Using SQL Server
3. Chapter 3: Working with Data Using Azure Cosmos DB
4. Chapter 4: Improving Performance and Scalability Using Multitasking
5. Chapter 5: Implementing Popular Third Party Libraries
6. Chapter 6: Working with Roslyn, Reflection and Expression Trees
7. Chapter 7: Handling Dates, Times, and Internationalization
8. Chapter 8: Protecting Your Data and Applications
9. Chapter 9: Building and Securing Web Services with Minimal APIs
10. Chapter 10: Exposing Data via the Web Using OData
11. Chapter 11: Combining Data Sources Using GraphQL
12. Chapter 12: Building Efficient Services Using gRPC
13. Chapter 13: Broadcasting Realtime Communication Using SignalR
14. Chapter 14: Building Serverless Services Using Azure Functions
15. Chapter 15: Building Web User Interfaces Using ASP.NET Core
16. Chapter 16: Building Web Components Using Blazor WebAssembly
17. Chapter 17: Leveraging Open Source Blazor Component Libraries
18. Chapter 18: Building Mobile and Desktop Apps Using .NET MAUI
19. Chapter 19: Implementing .NET MAUI Mobile Features
20. Chapter 20: Introducing the Survey Project Challenge

https://packt.link/EarlyAccess

In this first chapter, the goals are setting up your development environment to use Visual Studio 2022 and/or Visual Studio Code, reviewing what is new with C# 8 up to C# 11 and what is new with .NET Core 3.1 up to .NET 7. Finally, we review good places to look for help.

The GitHub repository for this book has solutions using full application projects for all code tasks:

https://github.com/markjprice/apps-services-net7/

Simply press the . (dot) key or change .com to .dev in the link above to change the GitHub repository into a live code editor based on Visual Studio Code using GitHub Codespaces.

Visual Studio Code in a web browser is great to run alongside your chosen code editor as you work through the book's coding tasks. You can compare your code to the solution code and easily copy and paste parts if needed.

Throughout this book, I use the term modern .NET to refer to .NET 7 and its predecessors like .NET 5 and .NET 6 that come from .NET Core. I use the term legacy .NET to refer to .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard. Modern .NET is a unification of those legacy platforms and standards.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Introducing this book and its contents
• Setting up your development environment
• Whats new in C# and .NET?
• Using other project templates
• Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
• Where to go for help

This book is unusual in that it attempts to cater to two related audiences:

• Readers who have completed my book for beginners, C# 11 and .NET 7 - Modern Cross-Platform Development, and now want to take their learning further.
• Readers who already have basic skills and knowledge about C# and .NET and want to learn practical skills and knowledge to build real-world applications and services.

This is the second of two books that continues your learning journey for .NET 7. The first book, C# 11 and .NET 7 - Modern Cross-Platform Development, takes the reader from beginner to intermediate level. This second book takes the reader from intermediate to advanced level.

The first book covers the C# language, the .NET libraries, and the fundamentals of ASP.NET Core for web development. It is designed to be read linearly because skills and knowledge from earlier chapters build up and are needed to understand later chapters.

This second book covers more specialized topics like internationalization, protecting your data and apps, monitoring and improving performance, and building services with OData, GraphQL, gRPC, SignalR, and Azure Functions, as well as building graphical user interfaces for websites, desktop, and mobile apps with Blazor and .NET MAUI, as shown in Figure 1.1:

We provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download this file from https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/???_ColorImages.pdf.

After this first chapter, this book can be divided into five parts:

1. Specialized libraries: Dates, times, and internationalization; protecting data with encryption, hashing, and signing; protecting apps with authentication and authorization; monitoring and improving performance with threads and tasks; reflection, expression trees, and working with the Roslyn compiler; third-party libraries for image handling, data validation rules, and so on. These chapters can be treated like a cookbook of recipes. If you are not interested in any topic, you can skip it, or you can read them in any order.