ASP.NET Core 5 and React Second Edition

Build fully functional, cloud-ready, and professional web applications using the latest features in the .NET 5 framework and React.js with Microsoft Azure

▶Book Description
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.

▶What You Will Learn
- Build RESTful APIs with .NET 5 using API controllers
- Secure REST APIs with identity and authorization policies
- Create strongly typed, interactive, and function-based React components using Hooks
- Understand how to style React components using Emotion.js
- Perform client-side state management with Redux
- Run a range of automated tests on the frontend and backend
- Implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes in Azure using Azure DevOps

▶Key Features
- Explore the new features of .NET 5 with this updated edition of ASP.NET Core 5 and React
- Discover strategies for adopting a full-stack development approach, clean architecture techniques, and development best practices
- Learn how to manage data, design and package applications, and secure your web apps

▶Who This Book Is For
If you're a web developer looking to get up to speed with full-stack web application development with .NET Core and React, this book is for you. Although the book does not assume any knowledge of React, a basic understanding of .NET Core will help you to get to grips with the concepts covered.

▶What this book covers
▷ Section 1: Getting Started
- Chapter 1, Understanding the ASP.NET 5 React Template, covers the standard SPA template that Visual Studio offers for ASP.NET Core and React apps. It covers the programmatic entry points for both the frontend and backend and how they work together in the Visual Studio solution.

- Chapter 2, Creating Decoupled React and ASP.NET 5 Apps, steps through how we can create an up-to-date ASP.NET Core and React solution. The chapter includes the use of TypeScript, which is hugely beneficial when creating large and complex frontends.

▷ Section 2: Building a Frontend with React and TypeScript
- Chapter 3, Getting Started with React and TypeScript, covers the fundamentals of React, such as JSX, props, state, and events. The chapter also covers how to create strongly typed components with TypeScript.

- Chapter 4, Styling React Components with Emotion, covers different approaches to styling React components. The chapter covers styling using plain CSS and then CSS modules before covering CSS-in-JS.

- Chapter 5, Routing with React Router, introduces a library that enables apps with multiple pages to be efficiently created. It covers how to declare all the routes in an app and how these map to React components, including routes with parameters. The chapter also covers how to load the components from a route on demand in order to optimize performance.

- Chapter 6, Working with Forms, covers how to build forms in React. The chapter covers how to build a form in plain React before leveraging a popular third-party library to make the process of building forms more efficient.

- Chapter 7, Managing State with Redux, steps through how this popular library can help manage state across an app. A strongly typed Redux store is built along with actions and reducers with the help of TypeScript.

▷ Section 3: Building an ASP.NET Backend
- Chapter 8, Interacting with the Database with Dapper, introduces a library that enables us to interact with SQL Server databases in a performant manner. Both reading and writing to a database are covered, including mapping SQL parameters from a C# class and mapping results to C# classes.

- Chapter 9, Creating REST API Endpoints, covers how to create a REST API that interacts with a data repository. Along the way, dependency injection, model binding, and model validation are covered.

- Chapter 10, Improving Performance and Scalability, covers several ways of improving the performance and scalability of the backend, including reducing database round trips, making APIs asynchronous, and data caching. Along the way, several tools are used to measure the impact of improvements.

- Chapter 11, Securing the Backend, leverages ASP.NET identity along with JSON web tokens in order to add authentication to an ASP.NET Core backend. The chapter also covers the protection of REST API endpoints with the use of standard and custom authorization policies.

- Chapter 12, Interacting with RESTful APIs, covers how a React frontend can talk to an ASP. NET Core backend using the JavaScript fetch function. The chapter also covers how a React frontend can gain access to protected REST API endpoints with a JSON web token.

▷ Section 4: Moving into Production
- Chapter 13, Adding Automated Tests, covers how to create unit tests and integration tests on the ASP.NET Core backend using xUnit. The chapter also covers how to create tests on pure JavaScript functions as well as React components using Jest.

- Chapter 14, Configuring and Deploying to Azure, introduces Azure and then steps through deploying both the backend and frontend to separate Azure app services. The chapter also covers the deployment of a SQL Server database to SQL Azure.

- Chapter 15, Implementing CI and CD with Azure DevOps, introduces Azure DevOps before stepping through creating a build pipeline that automatically triggers when code is pushed to a source code repository. The chapter then steps through setting up a release pipeline that deploys the artifacts from the build into Azure.