Resources for Learning .NET

If you are new to dotnet, or want to stay up to date with what is going on in and arround that space there are some great resources out there, to help you on your journey. Microsoft themselves have done a great job with https://learn.microsoft.com and it is a great place to get documentation but there is a lot more out there that you can tap into to help you on your journey as a dotnet developer. This article is a list of the most resources that I have found most useful over the past few years. I hope you will find value in them too!

Podcasts

Believe me when I say if you do nothing else in this article, you should subscribe to:

DotNetRocks!

So many of the tools and techniques I use on a daily basis I first heard about on this show. Carl and Richard are wonderful hosts and the show is fantastic. The “better know a framework” segment, with its wonderfully bonkers intro has sent me down many a rabit hole of discovery. Carl also has a security podcast called “Security this Week” which is incredibly entertaining, and Richard does a podcast that is more targetted towards IT system admins called “Run as Radio”, so check thoose out too.

Blogs

There are loads of blogs for dotnet devs out there, including various blogs produced by Microsoft and the Visual Studio team. As a starting point tho, I would recomend the following:

The Morning Brew

Chris Alcock produces a curated list of awesome blog articles for dotnet devs most days. There are a lot of blogs out there, but Chris consistantly seems to find the best stuff to share.

C# Digest

Another curated list of awesome blog articles for dotnet devs, this one produced on a weekly bases. You can have the list e-mailed out to you or subscribe to the RSS feed and consume it with your favourite Feed Reader App.

YouTube Channels

YouTube is full of usefull videos for dotnet developers. Here are my three top picks:

Nick Chapsas

Nick showcases practical tools, techniques and patterns, that often make me rethink my approach to the way I code. Well worth subscribing.

Code Opinion

Code opinion is a great channel with Derek Comartin discussing coding patterns and providing practical examples of clean coding. Lots of good stuff on Domain driven design, CQRS and message queues.

.NET

A Microsoft channel, great for 101 tutorial videos and the best place to catch up on Keynotes and sessions from .Net Conf.

Examples of good coding

The projects and samples below should help you to “fall into the pit of success”:

ABP Framework

“ABP Framework is a complete infrastructure to create modern web applications by following the best practices and conventions of software development.”

ASPNet Boilerplate

“ASP.NET Boilerplate is a general purpose application framework especially designed for new modern web applications. It uses already familiar tools and implements best practices around them to provide you a SOLID development experience”

eShopOnWeb

“Sample ASP.NET Core reference application, powered by Microsoft, demonstrating a single-process (monolithic) application architecture and deployment model”

Put together by Steve Smith. Theres also a free ebook you can download to accompany the solution. The project uses a bunch of useful Nuget packages such as MediatR and some great ones produced by Steve including:

• Ardalis.GuardClauses
• Ardalis.Result
• Ardalis.Specification

eShopOnContainers

“Sample .NET Core reference application, powered by Microsoft, based on a simplified microservices architecture and Docker containers”

Great example for Micro-Service arcitecture. Would strongly recomend starting with the eshoponweb tho, and moving towards this more complicated arcitecture when needed.

Coding Playground

Try dotnet

Sometimes you just want to tryout something simple. Like manipulating a string. With “try dot net” you can do a quick P.O.C in the browser to confirm something works the way you expect.