.Net Core : Where to Start
Most of the articles in this blog serve as “How to Start” guides to people who are attempting a subject.
When I wanted to learn about a new topic one thing I found hardest was finding out where to start. There’s a lot of material on the Internet. It’s hard to find the right starting points wading through the mire of it.
In this article I’m trying to give you some ideas where to start off if you want to learn .Net Core.
Most college students don’t learn about .Net Core at school. They usually learn about Object Oriented Programming maybe with one or a few other programming subjects. But today in the industrial world it is .Net Core that is used. Because of it’s ubiquitous adoption Software Engineers who program with .Net who have been working with the older framework have to move into .Net Core. Programmers of other areas who are trying to learn .Net or C# may find that they’d prefer to learn .Net Core to the older framework. I’m hoping that this article will be helpful for these groups.
When Microsoft created .Net Core they labeled their previous work .Net Framework. Although they said they’ll be stopping to support the .Net Framework on a certain year you can still find .Net Framework projects on Visual Studio. It may be easier to work with .Net Framework if you’re starting to learn .Net or C# but if you’re pursuing a career in programming in .Net you’ll have to learn .Net Core too.
A good place to start is the Microsoft tutorials. There are three approaches in .Net Core. Razor pages, MVC and Blazor. Although Microsoft writes articles on Blazor as much as the other two technologies I’m yet to see a company in the industry which has adopted it. But Razor pages and MVC are essential if you’re a serious programmer. Some companies may let you work with only one of them but if you want to change jobs you’ll find that you’ll be asked about the other technology. So it’s a good idea to lean both.
To start learning about Razor pages you can look at this tutorial “Get started with C# and ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio”. After that this tutorial “Create a Razor Pages web app with ASP.NET Core” is good as a second article. Then you have to read this article “Razor Pages with Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET Core — Tutorial 1 of 8”.
A note on Entity Framework Core. If you’re going to start working on .Net Core it’ll be necessary to learn Entity Framework Core as it is used by the companies which work on .Net Core. The tutorials I’m recommending will give you a good starting point on Entity Framework Core as well.
When you’re working with the tutorials don’t merely read them. Start a Visual Studio project and type in the code. And then only you’ll see the points where you get stuck.
To learn MVC the starting point is this article “Get started with ASP.NET Core MVC”. Then you can refer “ASP.NET Core MVC with EF Core — tutorial series”.
You’ll be asked about Authentication and Authorization too. So it’s a good idea to learn those as well. This article “Introduction to Identity on ASP.NET Core” is a good first article. Then you can refer “Create an ASP.NET Core web app with user data protected by authorization”.
After doing the Microsoft Tutorials you can read more theory on .Net Core by referring tutorials which are found on other websites. Just type “.net core tutorial” in search and you’ll get several good hits on tutorials you can refer. I usually refer two for the sake of effectiveness. (If you want to you can type the code in these tutorials as well but I find that the Microsoft tutorials are enough for practice and I read these other tutorials to learn more theory).
Then search for “entity framework core” for at least two tutorials on Entity Framework Core as well.
While you’re going through the Microsoft tutorials you can read the other Microsoft articles which are linked in those for additional information or you can search for the terms that you feel that you have to learn more. (It’s a good idea to keep a list of these links so that you can refer to them in the future. Sometimes you come across a good article but later when you want to read it the search engine might not show it close to the top).
After you’ve completed the Microsoft tutorials and the other tutorials for more theory do a small application on your own. It doesn’t have to be very dissimilar to the applications discussed in the Microsoft tutorials. If you want to you can refer the tutorials to implement certain things. This step in doing your own application is important to get a thorough handle on the technologies.
I hope this helps you in navigating into .Net Core.
