Book Image

C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fourth Edition

By : Mark J. Price
Book Image

C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fourth Edition

By: Mark J. Price

Overview of this book

In C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development, Fourth Edition, expert teacher Mark J. Price gives you everything you need to start programming C# applications. This latest edition uses the popular Visual Studio Code editor to work across all major operating systems. It is fully updated and expanded with new chapters on Content Management Systems (CMS) and machine learning with ML.NET. The book covers all the topics you need. Part 1 teaches the fundamentals of C#, including object-oriented programming, and new C# 8.0 features such as nullable reference types, simplified switch pattern matching, and default interface methods. Part 2 covers the .NET Standard APIs, such as managing and querying data, monitoring and improving performance, working with the filesystem, async streams, serialization, and encryption. Part 3 provides examples of cross-platform applications you can build and deploy, such as web apps using ASP.NET Core or mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. The book introduces three technologies for building Windows desktop applications including Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, as well as web applications, web services, and mobile apps.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Understanding legacy Windows application platforms

With the Microsoft Windows 1.0 release in 1985, the only way to create Windows applications was to use the C language and call functions in three core DLLs named kernel, user, and GDI. Once Windows became 32-bit with Windows 95, the DLLs were suffixed with 32 and became known as the Win32 API.

In 1991, Microsoft introduced Visual Basic, which provided developers a visual, drag and drop from a toolbox of controls way to build the user interface for Windows applications. It was immensely popular, and the Visual Basic runtime is still part of Windows 10 today.

In 2002, Microsoft introduced .NET Framework, which included Windows Forms for building Windows applications. The code could be written in either Visual Basic or C# languages. Windows Forms had a similar drag and drop visual designer, although it generated C# or Visual Basic code to define the user interface, which can be difficult for humans to understand and...