Category: reviews

Morning Dew Quick Review – Chris Woodruff’s Networking Programming with C#

I recently got an eBook copy of Beyond Boundaries – Networking Programming with C# 12 and .NET 8 from Chris Woodruff, and I had a chance to browse the book and read a few of the chapters in more detail this weekend.networkingprog

Chris decided to self-publish this book on Leanpub, and it was released less than a month ago. If you follow his blog, you may have seen that he wrote the book in the open, releasing content from chapters as they were finished. When you buy an eBook on Leanpub, the other sets a suggested price and a minimum price, and you can adjust what you pay based on those guidelines. When you change the price, you’re shown exactly how much of the cost goes to the author.

I really like how the book is structured, and it’s one of those rare .NET books that gets deeper on topics. It’s getting harder to find books published on something more advanced than an “intro to” a topic. There are several chapters on some important fundamental concepts of networking before getting into implementations and features in .NET.

Some of the C#/.NET content later in the book includes chapters on async/await, WebSockets, REST APIs with ASP.NET Core and EF Core, WebRTC, gRPC, message queuing, and SignalR. The SignalR chapter was one of the ones I read in its entirety so far. I chose it because it’s a feature I’ve used but not for several years. I thought it would be interesting to review some chapters where I’m familiar with the topic but probably pretty rusty. The chapter provided a nice refresher for me, and I learned a few new things about debugging and scaling SignalR projects. The chapter also provides a good introduction for anyone new to SignalR.

One final note about the book’s content: Chris uses just enough diagrams and other figures to help illustrate the topics in his book, and the diagrams are excellent. You can tell he’s been a developer and architect for a long time. Smile

I highly recommend this book to any mid-to-senior level .NET developer. If you’re newer to .NET, you should at least have a handle on the basics of C#, .NET, and maybe a little ASP.NET Core for some of the chapters. Go check out Chris’ blog for some sample content, and get your copy of this book today!

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!

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!

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