Preface

Have you ever stopped to think about the number of technologies, languages, and frameworks that currently exist for developing software solutions? It is certainly almost impossible to list them since, with technological advancement, new frameworks, and technologies emerge every day. Associated with the collaboration model proposed by the open source movement, access to information and source code of technologies from major players allows people to develop their own technologies, which end up becoming a path for developing solutions.

In the context of web applications, there have been several developments and, with these, different approaches and tools have emerged that allow the development of increasingly rich and complex applications. Often, the traditional client-server development model is no longer sufficient for certain contexts, and with the evolution of technologies, the use of other approaches to improve the user experience of web applications has made JavaScript frameworks popular, giving rise to other development models such as the use of Single-Page Applications (SPAs), which, combined with a powerful server-side processing model, make web applications more interactive and richer than ever. When we look back at the development model from a few years ago, we needed a few JavaScript files, an interpreted language such as PHP, Perl, or Classic ASP to process requests on the server side, and a database to persist information.

However, the market has become more dynamic and demanding, making technological advances increasingly faster. The web solution development model has gone from a stack of three or four technologies to a multitude of resources, packages, frameworks, standards, design patterns, and, no less important, interaction with cloud environments. While we have a modern development scenario, we are also involved in a great complexity of available resources so that we can create rich solutions that have the capacity to support the diverse needs of the market and dynamically follow the constant evolution and changes in the needs of organizations to deliver solutions that are increasingly more adherent to the market, remaining competitive.

Dealing with different technologies is also a challenge for several teams that must learn different languages and standards, and also use different tools to combine these technologies and maintain a sustainable distributed development model. This book aims to provide tools, standards, and possibilities to software engineers who need to deliver web solutions in a dynamic manner, delivering constant value, while benefiting from best practices and staying up to date in a scenario of constant technological evolution. To achieve these goals, we will learn about the ASP.NET Core 9 platform, which is a powerful open-source solution from Microsoft that allows us to develop high-quality applications, prepared to deal with the standards and requirements of cloud-native applications and, best of all, centralized in a single platform.

ASP.NET Core 9 is a technology that is constantly evolving and has modern features, allowing software engineers to have the ability to extend and customize while using high-level approaches for solutions that must be prepared to run in different types of environments, whether local, on-premises or especially in cloud environments. With ASP.NET Core 9, software engineers benefit from the use of practices such as interaction with CLI tools. It is independent of the operating system, has great support from the technical community that provides several packages and providers, and the framework is constantly evolving through the open-source community. It is a technology that has extensive documentation and support and is prepared for the most diverse types of solutions, in addition to adapting to the cloud-native model and, of course, has the capacity to integrate with other technologies, in addition to JavaScript frameworks.

ASP.NET Core 9 is a powerful web development platform, with several tools available for development on different operating systems. However, it is important to understand concepts that go beyond the coding process.

During the course of this book, we will learn about the concepts and fundamentals of the ASP.NET Core 9 platform, in addition to understanding development approaches and cloud architectures, learning about the best resources for designing web solutions, using mechanisms for delivering constant value in an automated manner such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), among other patterns and best practices of the cloud-native solution development model, and much more.