The Dew Review – Customizing ASP.NET Core 6.0 from @packtpub

I recently received a review copy of Customizing ASP.NET Core 6.0 in eBook format. This Packt Publishing title was written by Jürgen Gutsch and will be available in early 2022 (you can pre-order print or Kindle versions now).

This is not your run-of-the-mill “getting started with ASP.NET Core” book. There are plenty of books and other online resources to get started building web applications with .NET. This book assumes you are familiar with the basics of ASP.NET Core development and dives right into the intermediate and advanced concepts (the good stuff). These are the things developers need to understand to build really robust, scalable, performant web applications.

I won’t re-hash the entire table of contents for you, but some of the most important (in my opinion) topics covered are:

  • Writing a BackgroundService
  • Writing Custom Middleware
  • Working with ASP.NET Core Identity and Customizing Identity Management
  • Custom ModelBinders and ActionFilters
  • Caching concepts

The sample code for each chapter is concise, self-contained, and can be applied to real-world applications. All of this sample code is freely available to readers on GitHub. I love that Packt using GitHub for their books’ sample code. It’s a great way for readers to work with the code and interact with the author and other community members. Readers have provided some great feedback to me through GitHub issues on my WinUI book‘s repository.

The author does a great job covering the topics that are important to enterprise web application developers using the latest recommended techniques in ASP.NET Core 6. I would recommend this book to ASP.NET Core developers or other experienced .NET developers looking to get started building web apps.

Happy reading!

.NET Conf, Packt Publishing, and My Book – Learn WinUI 3

.NET Conf 2021 is coming up on November 9-11. It’s going to be an exciting week with both Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 being released. There has been no date announced yet for the Windows App SDK 1.0 and WinUI 3 release, but I expect them to launch very soon as well. We do know that the third release candidate for Windows App SDK 1.0 will be coming this week!

Packt Publishing is one of the sponsors of .NET Conf this year. They will also be taking part in the secret decoder challenge for conference attendees. The contest will give the audience the chance to win a $500 prize from Packt. Make sure you watch .NET Conf to find out how you can participate and win great prizes from many of the sponsors, including Packt.

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As part of the challenge, Packt has launched a .NET Conf storefront on Amazon featuring books about .NET, ASP.NET Core, Visual Studio, Blazor, WinUI, and more. Check out the books to get a jump on the latest from Microsoft and .NET.

The full .NET Conf 2021 agenda is now available. Save the date, learn about .NET, and win some great prizes! And don’t forget to check out my book, Learn WinUI 3 from Packt!

Adventures in Technical Editing – Three Recent Packt Book Review Projects

2019 was a busy year for me, as evidenced by the relative inactivity on my other blogs:

One of the activities that limited my 2019 blogging time was serving as a technical reviewer for three different .NET related books from Packt Publishing. All three of these books were released in the last few weeks.

Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3

This book, written by Shakti Tanwar, is intended for experienced .NET developers who want to build a deep understanding of parallel and async programming with C# and .NET Core. Most of the concepts here apply just as well to .NET Framework developers, so I wouldn’t shy away from this one if you’re not using .NET Core in your projects.

I use async/await, the TPL and parallel programming concepts quite a bit in my daily work, and I still learned quite a bit from this book. I definitely recommend it if you want to build some degree of parallelism into your applications.

Learn ASP.NET Core 3

The 2nd edition book, written by Kenneth Yamikani Fukizi, Jason De Oliveira, and Michel Bruchet, details what you need to get up to speed with .NET Core 3, ASP.NET Core 3 and Entity Framework Core to build modern web applications while leveraging Microsoft Azure along the way.

The authors touch on a little bit of Blazor, one of today’s hottest .NET topics, and give some great advice for building, testing and deploying web applications with ASP.NET Core 3. If you’re familiar with .NET and ready to get into ASP.NET Core, this Packt book provides some good foundations.

C# 8 and .NET Core 3 Projects Using Azure

This second edition book by Paul Michaels, Dirk Strauss, and Jas Rademeyer is written in a fun & useful format. Each chapter is a stand-alone project that drills down into an aspect of C# and/or .NET Core development, and all of the code can is available to readers to try for themselves.

Readers will learn things like Entity Framework Core, rich UWP app development, Azure Functions, ASP.NET Core, and lots more. Some chapters will be useful to any developer, but the majority of the topics here will be most useful to devs with some .NET experience. I like this one and have recommended it to the developers on my team.

Wrapping Up

Let me know what you think of these books. Have you read any of them? What is on your reading list for 2020?

Happy learning!