NET in Action, Second Edition

from the Ground Up 💻

.NET in Action, Second Edition is a hands-on guide to building modern applications on platform. Dustin Metzgar moves from the first console app to web services, data access, testing, and deployment concerns, showing how the pieces fit together in real projects. The second edition brings the material up to date for today’ and C# development.

What You’ll Build and Explore

Early chapters establish the runtime, project templates, and C# language features that make day-to-day development smoother. From there, the book works through Core services and Razor Pages, file and network I/O, JSON, HTTP requests, and asynchronous programming. Entity Framework Core and relational data get substantial coverage, including async data access and exposing APIs with Swagger/OpenAPI.

Testing and Design That Holds Up ⚙️

A large portion of the book is devoted to writing code that is easier to test. You’ll encounter SOLID principles, xUnit fact and theory tests, dependency substitution, fakes, and integration testing with in-memory databases and HTTP calls. The emphasis is not just on making tests pass, but on understanding why certain designs make testing and maintenance less painful.

Preparing for Production

The later chapters turn to concerns that appear once an application leaves the tutorial stage: security, performance and profiling, failure handling, world-ready applications, and containers. Together, these sections help developers think beyond feature code toward the operational realities of software.

Who This Book Is For

Readers who know some C# or have basic programming experience will find a structured path development. The book is also useful for developers coming from Framework projects who want a clear view of, and for anyone who learns best by building small, focused applications instead of reading abstract theory alone.