ASP.NET Core – Building web applications on .NET (ASP2)

Course content:

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• Introduction to ASP.NET Core
1. Overall architecture and its place in the wider ecosystem
2. Overview of app types: MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor, REST API, Minimal APIs, gRPC

• Application lifecycle
1. How request/response works
2. ASP.NET Core pipeline
3. Middleware (using built-in and writing custom)
4. Controller as the basic organizational unit

• Dependency Injection & Services
1. Using and creating services
2. Scopes and lifetimes (Singleton, Scoped, Transient)

• Authorization and Authentication with Identity
1. Use the full template or only parts (e.g., without UI)
2. Customizing the default UI template
3. Configuration options and behavior modification

• Exceptions and logging
1. Working with exceptions and errors
2. HTTP response status codes and external communication
3. Logging errors and custom messages
4. Popular logging libraries and tools

• Routing
1. Ways to map URLs to code (endpoints, function mapping, controllers)
2. Parameters and binding (constraints, model binding)
3. Helpers and tag helpers for creating links

• Data layer
1. Introduction to Entity Framework Core
2. How to configure and use EF Core in ASP.NET Core apps
3. Best practices and practical advice

• Validation
1. Principles of validation
2. User input validation (client vs server)
3. Database-side validation using EF Core

• Debugging applications
1. Stepping through actions and finding bugs
2. Inspecting values of the current request

• Building APIs
1. Choosing an approach: Controllers vs Minimal APIs
2. Routing and HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
3. Working with data and model binding
4. Securing APIs
5. OpenAPI documentation (Swashbuckle / Swagger)

• Building web applications (MVC and Razor Pages)
1. Choosing an approach: MVC vs Razor Pages vs Blazor
2. Project architecture and organization
3. Views and Razor syntax — embedding C# in HTML
4. Layer integration and communication
5. Passing parameters between forms and code

• Blazor applications
1. Differences compared to other app types
2. SignalR and the Blazor lifecycle
3. Blazor Server vs WebAssembly
4. SSR (server-side rendering)
5. Demo of a simple application

• gRPC applications
1. Origins and motivation for gRPC
2. Comparison with REST, WCF, JSON-RPC
3. Example client and server in ASP.NET Core

• Deploying web applications (publish, deploy)
1. To IIS (Windows Server)
2. To cloud (Azure)
3. Docker
4. Hosting in a self-contained process

• Using Visual Studio
1. Project navigation
2. Code generation (scaffolding)
3. Extensions
4. Visual Studio vs VS Code
5. Working with NuGet packages

• Additional / advanced topics
1. Synchronous vs asynchronous methods in ASP.NET Core
2. Background services
3. Service providers (built-in and custom)
4. HttpClient and HttpClientFactory
5. Service scope management
6. Working with HttpContext
7. Environments (development vs production)
8. Handling sensitive data (passwords, connection strings)