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Introducing Real-World Web Development Using .NET

This book is about mature and proven web development with .NET. This means a set of technologies that have been refined over a decade or more with plenty of documentation, support forums, and third-party investment. These technologies are:

• .NET: A free, open-source developer platform from Microsoft for building and running cross-platform apps, including web, desktop, mobile, cloud, and games, using languages like C#, F#, and Visual Basic.
• ASP.NET Core: A set of shared components for building websites and services using .NET. This book covers a subset of its features, including the following:
  • ASP.NET Core MVC: An implementation of the model-view-controller design pattern for complex yet well-structured website development
  • ASP.NET Core Web API: For building controller-based web services that conform to the HTTP/REST service architecture conventions
  • ASP.NET Core OData: For building data access web services using an open standard
• FastEndpoints: A third-party web service platform built on ASP.NET Core.
• Umbraco CMS: A third-party, open-source, content management system (CMS) platform built on ASP.NET Core.

With these technologies, you will learn how to build cross-platform websites and web services using .NET 10.

A benefit of choosing .NET 10 is that it is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, meaning it is supported for three years. .NET 10 was released in November 2025, and it will reach its end of life in November 2028. After .NET 11 is released in November 2026, you can target it, but be aware that it is a Standard Term Support (STS) release, and it will reach its end of life in November 2028, on the same day as .NET 10. You can learn more about STS 24-month support durations at the following link:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-sts-releases-supported-for-24-months/.

Usually, the benefits of choosing the latest .NET version are performance improvements and better support for containerization in cloud hosting compared to earlier versions.

Throughout this book, I use the term modern .NET to refer to .NET 10 and its predecessors, like .NET 6, that derive 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.

Who are you? While writing this book, I have assumed that you are a .NET developer who is employed by a consultancy or a large organization. As such, you primarily work with mature and proven technologies like MVC rather than the newest shiny technologies pushed by Microsoft like Blazor. I also assume that you have little professional interest in being a web designer or content editor. You are much more concerned with how well a software product works rather than looks.

I assume you have already set up your development environment to use Visual Studio 2026, Visual Studio Code, or JetBrains Rider. Throughout this book, I will use the names Visual Studio, VS Code, and Rider to refer to these three code editors, respectively. If you have not set up your development environment, then you can learn how to in Appendix B, Setting Up Your Development Environment, or at the following link:

https://github.com/markjprice/web-dev-net10/blob/main/docs/ch01-setup-dev-env.md.

Warning! Prerequisites for this book are knowledge of C# and .NET fundamentals, including how to build .NET projects with a tool like Visual Studio or the dotnet command-line interface (CLI). You can learn these skills from my book, C# 14 and .NET 10 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals.

I recommend that you work through this and subsequent chapters sequentially because later chapters will reference projects in earlier chapters, and you will build up sufficient knowledge and skills to tackle the more challenging problems in later chapters. For example, a section in this chapter will walk you through creating a pair of class libraries that define a database entity model that will be used in subsequent chapters.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introducing this book and its siblings
• Understanding ASP.NET Core
• Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
• Structuring projects and managing packages
• Building an entity model for use in the rest of the book
• Looking for help
• Using future versions of .NET with this book
• Understanding web development

Free Benefits with Your Book

Your purchase includes a free PDF copy of this book (containing 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 siblings

Before we dive in, let's set the context by understanding that this is one of four books about .NET 10 that I have written that cover almost everything a beginner to .NET needs to know.

This book is the second of a quartet of books that completes your learning journey through .NET 10:

1. The first book, C# 14 and .NET 10 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals, covers the fundamentals of the C# language, the .NET libraries, and using modern ASP.NET Core, Blazor, and Minimal API web services 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.
2. The second book (the one you're reading now), 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.
3. The third book, Apps and Services with .NET 10, covers data using SQL Server, Dapper, and EF Core, as well as more specialized .NET libraries like internationalization and popular third-party packages including Serilog and Noda Time. You will learn how to build native ahead-of-time (AOT)-compiled services with ASP.NET Core Minimal API web services and how to improve performance, scalability, and reliability using caching, queues, and background services. You will implement modern services using GraphQL, gRPC, and SignalR. Finally, you will learn how to build graphical user interfaces for websites, desktop, and mobile apps with .NET MAUI, Avalonia, and Blazor.
4. 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 it be unit, integration, performance, or web user interface testing, and then topics for testing cloud-native solutions on your local computer, like containerization, Docker, and Aspire. Finally, we will 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 for beginner-to-intermediate readers

Now, let's review some of the history of web development using .NET, which means learning about one of its most important platforms, ASP.NET Core.

Understanding ASP.NET Core

To understand ASP.NET Core, it is useful to first see where it came from.

A brief history of ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core is part of a 30-year history of Microsoft technologies used to build websites and services that work with data that have evolved over the decades:

• ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) was released in 1996 and was Microsoft's attempt to provide a single set of Component Object Model (COM) components for working with data. With the release of .NET Framework in 2002, an equivalent was created named ADO.NET, which is still today the fastest method to work with data in .NET with its core classes,...