Starting our .NET Core WebAPI Journey – Step 1

As we embark on this journey of .NET Core & WebAPI, I think getting a high-level overview of what we want to accomplish is ideal to get us started.  Let’s refresh what we said in that first article and refine it a little further.  This is what we said:

I don’t want to do a simple ‘Hello World’ example where we build something but it has no value.  I’d like to walk through this journey creating a real-world application with some of the layers I’d create.  So, let’s start with this:

·        Create a .NET Standard Business class library using Entity framework

·        Create a .NET Core WebAPI which uses our .NET Standard library.  We’ll set this up just as if you are doing it for real. We will use Dependency Injection, AutoMapper to convert our objects and define our settings in the appsettings.json file.

Now taking this further, lets define a semi real-world experience.  If you noticed one of my first articles on LinkedIn, it was about setting up a background process on a Raspberry Pi.  I’m still very interested in that so I’d like to use this journey to build some services to call from that background process. My real-world problem comes back to a few topics I’ve seen from building solutions over these years. One of them comes from logging or testing certain features and a second one comes from managing our emails being sent from different solutions.  A good example of the email issue is, I used to do eCommerce transactions and during the checkout process, we discovered how long it took for the customer to click on checkout button and then for the confirmation view/page to return.  The sale needed to complete and during that time, we sent one or more emails to the customer and to our vendor fulfilling the sale.  The biggest issue was the amount of time to complete the entire process.  I always wanted a way to “push” or queue the emailing logic onto a background process to handle speeding up the confirmation page. I also thought that technically had no bearing on the eCommerce Transaction as well. What we’re going to eventually build is a Raspberry pi, running a background process to fulfill the emails and also log the background processes events.  This way, we can get information or errors that are going on within the Raspberry Pi. 

So, thinking about this application and wanting to build it in a real-world process, I’m initially thinking of building a .NET Standard Client Library.  This will use Entity Framework to access the database and also have the ability to send the emails.  I want to build this in .NET Standard as I may want to reuse this functionality in a .NET Framework solution someday.  Once our Class library is complete, we’ll look to create our WebAPI Services. 

I’m a huge fan of Step by Step guides while learning so while we are on this Journey, we’re going to do a few things to hopefully help myself and you learn.  We’ll create a more detailed Step by Step guide of our solution so you can follow along.  We’re going to upload everything into GitHub at the end so its FREE for you to use and enhance.  I’m going to keep documenting our Journey.  This way, you can understand some of the challenges I faced as well as Links and articles I found extremely helpful.