Every day, software developers, application architects, and IT project managers work on building applications as quickly as possible in order to be leaders in their respective markets: time-to-market (TTM) is of utmost importance. Unfortunately, the quality and performance of those applications are often not as expected, since they have not been fully tested, optimized, and secured.

During the past few years, ASP.NET has evolved into becoming one of the most consistent, stable, and feature-rich frameworks available on the market for web application development. It provides all expected characteristics you can think of concerning performance, stability, and security out of the box.

For some time now, the IT market has been changing. Compliance with different standards is now required and customers expect industrialized, high-performing, and scalable applications, while developers ask for frameworks that allow higher productivity and extensibility to adapt to specific business needs. Accordingly, this has led Microsoft to completely rethink its web technologies.

As a result, Microsoft has built ASP.NET Core, which gives developers the capacity to do the following:

• Create applications and compile them in a specific environment, but then run them in any environment (such as Linux, Windows, or macOS).
• Use third-party libraries with additional functionalities.
• Work with various tools, frameworks, and libraries.
• Adopt the most up-to-date best practices for frontend development.
• Develop flexible, responsive web applications.

ASP.NET Core 3, together with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, includes several features to make your life as a web developer easier and more productive. For example, Visual Studio offers project templates that you can use to develop your web applications. Visual Studio also supports several development modes, including using Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) directly to test your web applications during development time and using a built-in web server to develop your web applications over FTP.

With the debugger in Visual Studio, you can run through your application and step through the critical areas of your code to find problems. With the Visual Studio editor, you can effectively develop your own custom user interfaces.

And when you are ready to deploy your application, Visual Studio makes it easy to create a deployment package for deployment on Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Docker, or any other platform including Linux and macOS. These are but a few of the features built into the ASP.NET Core framework when paired with Visual Studio.

This book provides the latest best practices and ASP.NET Core guidance to get you up to speed quickly. Each section of this book presents specific ASP.NET Core 3 features in an easily readable format with detailed examples. The step-by-step instructions yield immediate working results. Most of the key features of ASP.NET Core are illustrated using succinct, easily understandable, and reusable examples. The examples are in-depth, in order to illustrate features without being overbearing.

In addition to showing ASP.NET Core features by example, this book contains practical applications of each feature so that you can apply these techniques in the real world. After reading this book and applying the exercises, you will have a great head start into building efficient web applications that include modern features, such as MVC architectures, web APIs, custom view components, and tag helpers.

We hope this book will help you in your daily job as a developer and that reading it will give you as much joy as writing it has given us.