Mark J. Price - C# 11 and .NET 7 – Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals: Start building websites and services with ASP.NET Core 7, Blazor, and EF Core 7, 7th Edition

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Early Access Publication: C# 11 and .NET 7 Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals

Early Access Production Reference: B18856

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN: 978-1-80323-780-0

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: Hello C#, Welcome .NET!
2. Chapter 2: Speaking C#
3. Chapter 3: Controlling Flow, Converting Types, and Handling Exceptions
4. Chapter 4: Writing, Debugging, and Testing Functions
5. Chapter 5: Building Your Own Types with Object-Oriented Programming
6. Chapter 6: Implementing Interfaces and Inheriting Classes
7. Chapter 7: Packaging and Distributing .NET Types
8. Chapter 8: Working with Common .NET Types
9. Chapter 9: Working with Files, Streams, and Serialization
10. Chapter 10: Working with Data Using Entity Framework Core
11. Chapter 11: Querying and Manipulating Data Using LINQ
12. Chapter 12: Introducing Web Development Using ASP.NET Core
13. Chapter 13: Building Websites Using ASP.NET Core Razor Pages
14. Chapter 14: Building Websites Using the Model-View-Controller Pattern
15. Chapter 15: Building and Consuming Web Services
16. Chapter 16: Building User Interface Components Using Blazor

https://packt.link/EarlyAccess

In this first chapter, the goals are setting up your development environment, understanding the similarities and differences between modern .NET, .NET Core, .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard, creating the simplest application possible with C# 11 and .NET 7 using various code editors, and then discovering good places to look for help.

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

https://github.com/markjprice/cs11dotnet7

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, 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.

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.

After this first chapter, the book can be divided into three parts: first, the grammar and vocabulary of the C# language; second, the types available in .NET for building app features; and third, the fundamentals of cross-platform websites, services, and browser apps that you can build using C# and .NET.

Most people learn complex topics best by imitation and repetition rather than reading a detailed explanation of the theory; therefore, I will not overload you with detailed explanations of every step throughout this book. The idea is to get you to write some code and see it run.

You don't need to know all the nitty-gritty details immediately. That will be something that comes with time as you build your own apps and go beyond what any book can teach you.

In the words of Samuel Johnson, author of the English dictionary in 1755, I have committed "a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity is free." I take sole responsibility for these and hope you appreciate the challenge of my attempt to lash the wind by writing this book about rapidly evolving technologies like C# and .NET, and the apps that you can build with them.

If you have a complaint about this book, then please contact me before writing a negative review on Amazon. Authors cannot respond to Amazon reviews so I cannot contact you to resolve the problem and help you, or at least listen to your feedback and try to do better in the next edition. Please email me (my address is on the GitHub repository for the book) or raise an issue at the following link: https://github.com/markjprice/cs11dotnet7/issues.

This first chapter covers the following topics:

• Setting up your development environment
• Understanding .NET
• Building console apps using Visual Studio 2022
• Building console apps using Visual Studio Code
• Exploring code using .NET Interactive Notebooks
• Reviewing the folders and files for projects
• Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
• Looking for help

Before you start programming, you'll need a code editor for C#. Microsoft has a family of code editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which include:

• Visual Studio 2022 for Windows
• Visual Studio 2022 for Mac