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 the React frontend

It's time to turn our attention to the React frontend. In this section, we'll inspect the frontend code, starting with the entry point, which is a single HTML page. We will explore how the frontend is executed in development mode and how it is built in preparation for deployment. We will then learn how the frontend dependencies are managed and also understand why it took over a minute to run the app for the first time. Finally, we will explore how React components fit together and how they access the ASP.NET Core backend.

Understanding the frontend entry point

We have a good clue as to where the entry point is from our examination of the Startup class in the ASP.NET Core backend. In the Configure method, the SPA middleware is set up with the source path set to ClientApp:

app.UseSpa(spa =>
{
  spa.Options.SourcePath = "ClientApp";
  if (env.IsDevelopment...