Chapter 1, Distributed Systems and How ServiceStack Jumps in, covers ServiceStack's technical basics and layout. It also introduces the design principles of APIs and the problems of distributed systems, which sets the foundation for the next chapters.

Chapter 2, ServiceStack as Your Unique Point of Access, introduces you to the IoC-container Funq and shows you how to access data from a session or cache. Finally, it teaches you how to secure your API.

Chapter 3, Asynchronous Communication between Components, introduces you to the concept of Messaging, which is then put into effect with Message Queue solutions, such as Redis and RabbitMQ. Additionally, push notifications from server to clients is covered by server-sent events (SSE).

Chapter 4, Analyzing and Tuning a Distributed System, teaches you how to add logging and profiling to ease the tracing of issues. Finally, methodologies to minimize the HTTP footprint are also introduced.

Chapter 5, Documentation and Versioning, shows you how to leverage built-in functionality to publish and modify the documentation of your API and introduces you to test clients, such as Swagger and Postman. Finally, the validation of requests is also covered.

Chapter 6, Extending ServiceStack, shows you how to write your own plugins, encapsulate services within them, and intercept requests and responses.

Most examples will simply require Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition, whereas some code integrates specific softwares with ServiceStack. The following is a list of the software required to run all the examples:

This book is targeted at developers who have already implemented web services with ASMX, WCF, or ServiceStack and want to gain more insight into the possibilities that ServiceStack has to offer to build distributed systems of all scales.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "As the NuGet package names often do not match the namespaces within, the NuGet package names are mentioned separately."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class Task
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
  public string Title { get; set; }
  public int UserId { get; set; }
}
interface IService
{
  Task GetTaskById(int id);
  Task[] GetAllTasks();
  Task[] GetTasksById(int[] ids);
  Task[] GetTasksForUserId(int userId);
  Task[] GetTasksByTitle(string title);
  Task[] GetTasksByTitleForUserId(string title, int userId);
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold, as shown:

private KeyValuePair<string, string>? GetCustomAuth(IRequest httpReq)
{
  var hasCredentials = httpReq.Dto as IHasCredentials;
  if (hasCredentials == null)
  {
    return null;
  }

  var userName = hasCredentials.UserName;
  var password = hasCredentials.Password;

  if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(userName) ||
      string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(password))
   {
    return null;
    }

  return new KeyValuePair<string, string>(userName, password);
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Hello John Doe!

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "One of the key points of ServiceStack is the Code-First approach."

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