Beginning ASP.NET Core | Course online

This course will give your ASP.NET Core development a solid start - in the right direction! It picks out and explains the things you need to know in order to use the framework effectively and develop testable solutions.

While the course has a focus on practical skills, it also takes the time to explain important underlying concepts, including how HTTP works, the MVC design pattern, the TDD workflow and dependency  inversion. In this course we are using ASP.NET Core version 3.x.

Target audience and prerequisites

.NET Developers who want to learn how to develop web applications using MVC and TDD. Good knowledge of programming in C# and the .NET platform. Also requires some knowledge of HTML and CSS, and perhaps some experience with JavaScript.

What you will learn

Web fundamentals

• How the web works: HTTP, servers, clients, statelessness

Introduction to ASP.NET Core

• .NET core
• ASP.NET vs ASP.NET Core
• A little history: ASP.NET WebForms, other approaches
• OWIN

The request pipeline

• Customizing
• HttpContext
• Static content
• Exceptions

Introduction to MVC

• The MVC pattern: models, views and controllers
• Creating an ASP.NET MVC web application
• Our first controller and view
• Adding a basic model
• Convention over configuration

Testing Fundamentals

• What is Test Driven Development?
• Introduction to xUnit
• Writing our first controller test
• Test explorer

Routes

• The relationship between routes and controllers
• Adding more routes
• Routes and linking
• Examining the request lifecycle
• ActionResult
• Route constraints

Dependency Inversion

• What is DI, and why does it matter?
• Refactoring towards DI
• Testing using hand-crafted stub objects
• The built in DI-container
• Mocking with NSubstitute

The Razor View Engine

• The Razor approach
• Loops and conditionals
• Built-in helpers
• Layouts
• Tag helpers
• Partial views
• View Components

Introducing Forms

• Adding a form and posting to a controller
• FormCollection
• Parameter binding
• Model binding
• Forms and testing

Linking to a Database

• Entity Framework Core
• Database first
• Code first
• Testable approaches to data access
• Repository pattern
• Scaffolding

Validation

• Client-side vs. server-side validation
• Validation annotations
• Custom validation
• Validation and testing

Web API

• Introduction to JSON
• What is a RESTful service?
• Writing API controllers
• Attribute routing
• Model binding and validation

Security

• The web is a dangerous place
• SQL Injection
• XSS
• CSRF
• HTTPS

Introduction to Razor pages

• MVC vs Razor pages
• Routing
• Model binding
• Validation