Apps and Services with .NET 10
Description
Building modern apps and services with C# and .NET isn't just about knowing the syntax-it's about knowing the right tools for the job. Whether you're building for web, desktop, or mobile, the .NET ecosystem offers a vast range of technologies. But with so many choices, it's easy to get stuck in a narrow skillset. Apps and Services with .NET 10 helps you build real-world experience across the breadth of what .NET has to offer. This edition covers practical implementations across a diverse set of technologies. You'll build APIs with ASP.NET Core Minimal API, gRPC, GraphQL, and SignalR, and create user-facing applications using Blazor for the web, Avalonia for desktop, and .NET MAUI for mobile. You'll also explore native AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation for high-performance web services, along with caching, messaging, and long-running background tasks. Each chapter provides hands-on projects and real-world context for when and why to use each tool. By the end, you'll have a full-stack command of modern .NET. You'll know how to select the right UI tech for your target platform, build APIs that scale, architect reliable backend services, and confidently adopt newer patterns. You won't just understand the tools-you'll know how to put them together to deliver robust, user-friendly, cross-platform apps in production environments. *Email sign-up and proof of purchase required
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Content
1
Introducing Apps and Services with .NET
In this first chapter, the goals are to introduce this book, related books, and their content, set up your development environment to use Visual Studio, VS Code, or Rider, and understand your choices for building apps and services. We will also review how to use the GitHub repository and good places to look for help.
The GitHub repository for this book has solutions using full application projects for all code tasks: https://github.com/markjprice/apps-services-net10/.
After going to the GitHub repository, simply press the . (dot) key on your keyboard or change .com to .dev to change the repository into a live code editor based on VS Code using GitHub Codespaces.
VS Code in a web browser is great to run alongside your chosen code editor as you work through the book's coding tasks. You can compare your code to the solution code and easily copy and paste parts if needed.
Throughout this book, I use the term modern .NET to refer to .NET 10 and its predecessors like .NET 5, which come from .NET Core. I use the term legacy .NET to refer to .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard. Modern .NET is a unification of those legacy platforms and standards.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- Introducing this book and its contents
- App and service technologies
- Setting up your development environment
- Structuring projects and managing packages
- Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
- Where to go for help
Free Benefits with Your Book
Your purchase includes a free PDF copy of this book - including Appendix A, B, and C - along with other exclusive benefits. Check the Free Benefits with Your Book section in the Preface to unlock them instantly and maximize your learning experience.
Introducing this book and its contents
This book caters to two audiences:
- Readers who have completed my book for beginners, C# 14 and .NET 10 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals, or an earlier edition, and now want to take their learning further.
- Readers who already have basic skills and knowledge about C# and .NET and want to learn practical skills and knowledge to build real-world applications and services using popular libraries and databases.
Companion books to continue your learning journey
This is one of four books in a quartet that provides a learning journey through .NET 10:
- The first book, C# 14 and .NET 10 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals, covers the fundamentals of the C# language, the .NET libraries, and modern ASP.NET Core for web development. It is designed to be read linearly because skills and knowledge from earlier chapters build up and are needed to understand later chapters.
- The second book, Real-World Web Development with .NET 10, covers mature and proven web development technologies like ASP.NET Core MVC and controller-based Web API web services, as well as OData, FastEndpoints, and Umbraco CMS for building real-world web projects on .NET 10. You will learn how to test your web services using xUnit and test the user interfaces of your websites using Playwright, and then how to containerize your projects ready for deployment.
- The third book, Apps and Services with .NET 10 (the one you're reading now), covers how to build graphical user interfaces for websites, desktop, and mobile apps with Blazor, Avalonia, and .NET MAUI respectively. Then you will learn more specialized library topics like internationalization and popular third-party packages including Serilog and NodaTime. You will learn how to build native AOT-compiled services with ASP.NET Core Minimal API and how to improve performance, scalability, and reliability using caching, queues, and background services. You will implement more services using GraphQL, gRPC, and SignalR, as well as learn how to integrate LLMs to add intelligence to your solutions.
- The fourth book, Tools and Skills for .NET 10, covers important tools and skills that a professional .NET developer should have. These include design patterns and solution architecture, debugging, memory analysis, all the important types of testing whether unit, performance, or web testing, and then containerization for deployment topics like Docker and Aspire. Finally, we look at how to prepare for an interview to get the .NET developer career that you want.
A summary of the .NET 10 quartet and their most important topics is shown in Figure 1.1:
Figure 1.1: Companion books for learning .NET 10
Cloud hosting and deployment topics are now online-only
The most frequent criticism I heard about the previous edition is its coverage of Azure. Although Azure has many free trials for its features, many readers would still prefer not to have to sign up for an Azure account. Azure is just one of many cloud hosts that readers will use, and more recently, some organizations have been moving back away from cloud hosting to self-hosting due to the often high costs of the cloud.
For this third edition, I decided to move all Azure cloud-specific content to online sections. They are still available for those readers who want to use Azure, but everyone else can avoid them if they want.
I made a similar choice about deployment tools. There are so many different tools that a reader might choose to use, that I decided to focus on the concept of containerization, primarily with Docker, which is often the first step to modern deployments.
What you will learn in this book
After this introductory chapter, this book can be divided into four parts, and the individual components are shown in Figure 1.2:
- App user interface technologies: How to build user interfaces for desktop, web, and mobile apps using Avalonia, Blazor, and .NET MAUI.
- Specialized libraries: Dates, times, and internationalization; and third-party libraries for image handling, data validation rules, logging, generating PDFs, and so on. These chapters can be treated like a cookbook of recipes. If you are not interested in any topic, you can skip it, and you can read them in any order.
- Databases: How to store and manage data with SQL-based databases like SQL Server. Later chapters use the sample database and entity models that you will create at the end of this chapter. There is also an optional online-only chapter about Azure Cosmos DB.
- Service technologies: How to build and secure services with ASP.NET Core Minimal API web services, GraphQL, gRPC, and SignalR. To improve service scalability and reliability, we cover queues, caching, and resilience features. We also cover how to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers with your apps and services to provide AI capabilities. There is also an optional online-only chapter about Azure Functions.
Figure 1.2: Technologies covered in Apps and Services with .NET 10
My learning philosophy
Most people learn complex topics best by imitation and repetition rather than reading a detailed explanation of the theory; therefore, I will not overload you with detailed explanations of every step throughout this book. The idea is to get you to write some code and see it run.
You don't need to know all the nitty-gritty details immediately. That will be something that comes with time as you build your own apps and go beyond what any book can teach you.
If you have an issue with something in this book, then please contact me before resorting to a negative review on Amazon. Authors cannot respond to Amazon reviews, so I cannot contact you to resolve the problem. I want to help you get the best from my book, and I want to listen to your feedback and do better in the next edition. Please email me (my email address can be found in the GitHub repository for the book), chat with me in the Discord channel for the book at the following link https://packt.link/apps_and_services_dotnet10, or raise an issue in the book's GitHub repository at the following link: https://github.com/markjprice/apps-services-net10/issues.
App and service technologies
In this section, we'll look at the major app and service technologies in the .NET ecosystem, from building traditional Windows-only desktop apps to creating cross-platform experiences. We'll explore frameworks like ASP.NET Core for web and API development, introduce service technologies such as WCF and newer alternatives like gRPC and GraphQL, and discuss options for building apps that go beyond Windows, including .NET MAUI and competing cross-platform frameworks. The goal is to understand the landscape of tools available so you can make informed decisions about which approach best fits your project.
Microsoft calls platforms for building applications and services app...
