What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding the Importance of Software Architecture, explains the basics of software architecture. This chapter will give you the right mindset to face customer requirements, and then select the right tools, patterns, and frameworks.

Chapter 2, Non-Functional Requirements, guides you in an important stage of application development, that is, collecting and accounting for all constraints and goals that the application must fulfill, such as scalability, availability, resiliency, performance, multithreading, interoperability, and security.

Chapter 3, Documenting Requirements with Azure DevOps, describes techniques for documenting requirements, bugs, and other information about your applications. While most of the concepts are general, the chapter focuses on the usage of Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Chapter 4, Deciding on the Best Cloud-Based Solution, gives you a wide overview of the tools and resources available in the cloud, and on Microsoft Azure. Here, you will learn how to search for the right tools and resources and how to configure them to fulfill your needs.

Chapter 5, Applying a Microservice Architecture to Your Enterprise Application, offers a broad overview of microservices and Docker containers. Here, you will learn how the microservices-based architecture takes advantage of all the opportunities offered by the cloud and you will see how to use microservices to achieve flexibility, high throughput, and reliability in the cloud. You will learn how to use containers and Docker to mix different technologies in your architecture as well as make your software platform independent.

Chapter 6, Azure Kubernetes Service, describes the Azure implementation of Kubernetes, which is a de facto standard for microservices orchestration. Here you will package and deploy microservices applications on Kubernetes.

Chapter 7, Interacting with Data in C# – Entity Framework Core, explains in detail how your application can interact with various storage engines with the help of Object-Relational Mappings (ORMs) and, in particular, with Entity Framework Core 6.0.

Chapter 8, How to Choose Your Data Storage in the Cloud, describes the main storage engines available in the cloud and in Microsoft Azure. Here, you will learn how to choose the best storage engines to achieve the read/write parallelism you need, how to configure them, and how to interact with them from your C# code.

Chapter 9, Working with Azure Functions, describes the serverless model of computation and how to use it in the Azure Cloud. Here, you will learn how to allocate cloud resources just when they are needed to run some computation, thus paying only for the actual computation time.

Chapter 10, Design Patterns and .NET 6 Implementation, describes common software patterns with .NET 6 examples. Here, you will learn the importance of patterns and best practices for using them.

Chapter 11, Understanding the Different Domains in Software Solutions, describes the modern domain-driven design software production methodology, and related design patterns and architectures. There you will also learn how to use it to face complex applications that require several knowledge domains, and how to use it to take advantage of cloud and microservices-based architectures.

Chapter 12, Implementing Code Reusability in C# 10, describes patterns and best practices to maximize code reusability in your .NET 6 applications with C# 10. It also discusses the importance of code refactoring.

Chapter 13, Applying Service-Oriented Architectures with .NET, describes service-oriented architecture, which enables you to expose the functionalities of your applications as endpoints on the web or on a private network so that users can interact with them through various types of clients. Here, you will learn how to implement service-oriented architecture endpoints with ASP.NET Core and gRPC, and how to self-document them with existing Open API packages.

Chapter 14, Implementing Microservices with .NET, describes how to implement a microservice with .NET in practice, and how to design communication among microservices. There, you will also learn how to use the gRPC communication protocol and the RabbitMQ message broker in your .NET projects.

Chapter 15, Presenting ASP.NET Core MVC, describes in detail the ASP.NET Core framework. Here, you will also learn how to implement web applications based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Chapter 16, Implementing Frontend Microservices with ASP.NET Core, is dedicated to frontend microservices, that is, to the microservices that fill the role of interacting with the world outside of the application. There, you will learn how to implement a frontend microservice based on ASP.NET Core with the help of a complete and detailed example.

Chapter 17, Blazor WebAssembly, describes the new Blazor framework that leverages the power of WebAssembly to run .NET in the user browser. Here you will learn how to implement single-page applications in C#.

Chapter 18, Native versus Web Clients, describes the various technologies for implementing native clients available in the .NET world. It also contains a preliminary introduction to .NET MAUI which, at the time the book was published, is still in preview.

Chapter 19, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, contains an introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning. The first part summarizes the basic principles and techniques, while the second part puts them into practice with a description of Azure Machine Learning Studio and a simple example based on ML.NET.

Chapter 20, Best Practices in Coding C# 10, describes best practices to be followed when developing .NET 6 applications with C# 10, including metrics that evaluate the quality of your software and how to measure them with the help of all the tools included in Visual Studio.

Chapter 21, Understanding DevOps Principles, describes the DevOps basis for software development and evolution. Here, you will learn how to organize your application’s continuous integration/continuous delivery cycle. It also describes how to automate the whole deployment process, from the creation of a new release in your source repository, through various testing and approval steps, to the final deployment of the application in the actual production environment. Here, you will learn how to use Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions to automate the whole deployment process.

Chapter 22, Challenges of Applying CI & CD Scenarios, complements the description of DevOps by discussing the opportunities and difficulties in achieving a continuous integration and continuous deployment scenario.

Chapter 23, Testing Your Enterprise Application, describes how to test your applications. Here, you will learn how to test .NET Core applications with xUnit and see how easily you can develop and maintain code that satisfies your specifications with the help of test-driven design. Here, you will also learn how to use functional tests to automatically verify whether a version of a whole application conforms to the agreed functional specifications.