Book Image

ASP.NET Core 5 and React - Second Edition

By : Carl Rippon
Book Image

ASP.NET Core 5 and React - Second Edition

By: Carl Rippon

Overview of this book

Microsoft’s .NET framework is a robust server-side framework, now even more powerful thanks to the recent unification of the Microsoft ecosystem with the .NET 5 framework. This updated second edition addresses these changes in the .NET framework and the latest release of React. The book starts by taking you through React and TypeScript components for building an intuitive single-page application and then shows you how to design scalable REST APIs that can integrate with a React-based frontend. Next, you’ll get to grips with the latest features, popular patterns, and tools available in the React ecosystem, including function-based components, React Router, and Redux. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn how to use React with TypeScript to make the frontend robust and maintainable and cover key ASP.NET 5 features such as API controllers, attribute routing, and model binding to build a sturdy backend. In addition to this, you’ll explore API security with ASP.NET 5 identity and authorization policies and write reliable unit tests using both .NET and React, before deploying your app on Azure. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to enhance your C# and JavaScript skills and build full-stack, production-ready applications with ASP.NET 5 and React.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started
4
Section 2: Building a Frontend with React and TypeScript
10
Section 3: Building an ASP.NET Backend
16
Section 4: Moving into Production

Understanding OIDC

Before we cover OIDC, let's make sure we understand authentication and authorization. Authentication verifies that the user is who they say they are. In our app, the user will enter their email and password to prove who they are. Authorization decides whether a user has permission to access a resource. In our app, some of the REST API endpoints, such as posting a question, will eventually be protected by authorization checks.

OIDC is an industry-standard way of handling both authentication and authorization as well as other user-related operations. This works well for a wide variety of architectures, including single-page applications (SPAs) such as ours where there is a JavaScript client and a server-side REST API that need to be secured.

The following diagram shows the high-level flow of a user of our app being authenticated and then gaining access to protected resources in the REST API:

Figure 11.1 – OIDC authentication...