Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core E-Book

Andrea Tosato

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 225

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Minimal APIs feature, introduced in .NET 6, is the answer to code complexity and rising dependencies in creating even the simplest of APIs. Minimal APIs facilitate API development using compact code syntax and help you develop web APIs quickly.
This practical guide explores Minimal APIs end-to-end and helps you take advantage of its features and benefits for your ASP.NET Core projects. The chapters in this book will help you speed up your development process by writing less code and maintaining fewer files using Minimal APIs. You’ll also learn how to enable Swagger for API documentation along with CORS and handle application errors. The book even promotes ideas to structure your code in a better way using the dependency injection library in .NET. Finally, you'll learn about performance and benchmarking improvements for your apps.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to fully leverage new features in .NET 6 for API development and explore how Minimal APIs are an evolution over classical web API development in ASP.NET Core.

Leseprobe

Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core

Build, test, and prototype web APIs quickly using .NET and C#

Andrea Tosato

Marco Minerva

Emanuele Bartolesi

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

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In memory of my mother and father, Giovanna and Francesco, for their sacrifices and for supporting me in studying and facing new challenges every day.

– Andrea Tosato

To my family, friends, and colleagues, who have always believed in me during this journey.

– Marco Minerva

In memory of my beloved mom, and to my wife, Francesca, for her sacrifices and understanding.

Last but not least, to my son, Leonardo. The greatest success in my life.

– Emanuele Bartolesi

Contributors

About the authors

Andrea Tosato is a full stack software engineer and architect of .NET applications. Andrea has successfully developed .NET applications in various industries, sometimes facing complex technological challenges. He deals with desktop, web, and mobile development but with the arrival of the cloud, Azure has become his passion. In 2017, he co-founded Cloudgen Verona (a .NET community based in Verona, Italy) with his friend, Marco Zamana. In 2019, he was named Microsoft MVP for the first time in the Azure category. Andrea graduated from the University of Pavia with a degree in computer engineering in 2008 and successfully completed his master’s degree, also in computer engineering, in Modena in 2011. Andrea was born in 1986 in Verona, Italy, where he currently works as a remote worker. You can find Andrea on Twitter.

Marco Minerva has been a computer enthusiast since elementary school when he received an old Commodore VIC-20 as a gift. He began developing with GW-BASIC. After some experience with Visual Basic, he has been using .NET since its first introduction. He got his master’s degree in information technology in 2006. Today, he lives in Taggia, Italy, where he works as a freelance consultant and is involved in designing and developing solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem, building applications for desktop, mobile, and web. His expertise is in backend development as a software architect. He runs training courses, is a speaker at technical events, writes articles for magazines, and regularly makes live streams about coding on Twitch. He has been a Microsoft MVP since 2013. You can find Marco on Twitter.

Emanuele Bartolesi is a Microsoft 365 architect who is passionate about frontend technologies and everything related to the cloud, especially Microsoft Azure. He currently lives in Zurich and actively participates in local and international community activities and events. Emanuele shares his love of technology through his blog. He has also become a Twitch affiliate as a live coder, and you can find him as kasuken on Twitch to write some code with him. Emanuele has been a Microsoft MVP in the developer technologies category since 2014, and a GitHub Star since 2022. You can find Emanuele on Twitter.

About the reviewers

Marco Parenzan is a senior solution architect for Smart Factory, IoT, and Azure-based solutions at beanTech, a tech company in Italy. He has been a Microsoft Azure MVP since 2014 and has been playing with the cloud since 2010. He speaks about Azure and .NET development at major community events in Italy. He is a community lead for 1nn0va, a recognized Microsoft-oriented community in Pordenone, Italy, where he organizes local community events. He wrote a book on Azure for Packt Publishing in 2016. He loves playing with his Commodore 64 and trying to write small retro games in .NET or JavaScript.

Marco Zamana lives in Verona in the magnificent hills of Valpolicella. He has a background as a software developer and architect. He was Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional for 3 years in the artificial intelligence category. He currently works as a cloud solution architect in engineering at Microsoft. He is the co-founder of Cloudgen Verona, a Veronese association that discusses topics related to the cloud and, above all, Azure.

Ashirwad Satapathi works as an associate consultant at Microsoft and has expertise in building scalable applications with ASP.NET Core and Microsoft Azure. He is a published author and an active blogger in the C# Corner developer community. He was awarded the title of C# Corner Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in September 2020 and September 2021 for his contributions to the developer community. He is also a member of the Outreach Committee of the .NET Foundation.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Introduction

1

Introduction to Minimal APIs

Technical requirements

A brief history of the Microsoft Web API

Creating a new minimal API project

Creating the project with Visual Studio 2022

Creating the project with Visual Studio Code

Looking at the structure of the project

Summary

2

Exploring Minimal APIs and Their Advantages

Technical requirements

Routing

Route handlers

Route parameters

Route constraints

Parameter binding

Special bindings

Custom binding

Exploring responses

Controlling serialization

Architecting a minimal API project

Going forward

Summary

3

Working with Minimal APIs

Technical requirements

Exploring Swagger

Swagger in the Visual Studio scaffold

OpenAPI Generator

Swagger in minimal APIs

Enabling CORS

CORS flow from an HTTP request

Setting CORS with a policy

Setting CORS with extensions

Setting CORS with an annotation

Working with global API settings

Configuration in .NET 6

Options pattern

Configuration sources

Error handling

Traditional approach

Problem Details and the IETF standard

Summary

Part 2: What’s New in .NET 6?

4

Dependency Injection in a Minimal API Project

Technical requirements

What is dependency injection?

Understanding dependency injection lifetimes

Implementing dependency injection in a minimal API project

Summary

5

Using Logging to Identify Errors

Technical requirements

Exploring logging in .NET

Configuring logging

Customizing log message

Infrastructure logging

Source generators

Leveraging the logging framework

Console log

Creating a custom provider

Application Insights

Storing a structured log with Serilog

Summary

6

Exploring Validation and Mapping

Technical requirements

Handling validation

Performing validation with data annotations

Integrating FluentValidation

Adding validation information to Swagger

Mapping data to and from APIs

Performing manual mapping

Mapping with AutoMapper

Summary

7

Integration with the Data Access Layer

Technical requirements

Using Entity Framework

Setting up the project

Adding EF Core to the project

Adding endpoints to the project

Using Dapper

Setting up the project

Creating a repository pattern

Using Dapper to query the database

Adding a new entity in the database with Dapper

Implementing the repository in the endpoints

Summary

Part 3: Advanced Development and Microservices Concepts

8

Adding Authentication and Authorization

Technical requirements

Introducing authentication and authorization

Protecting a minimal API

Generating a JWT bearer

Validating a JWT bearer

Adding JWT support to Swagger

Testing authentication

Handling authorization – roles and policies

Handling role-based authorization

Applying policy-based authorization

Using default and fallback policies

Summary

9

Leveraging Globalization and Localization

Technical requirements

Introducing globalization and localization

Localizing a minimal API application

Adding globalization support to Swagger

Using resource files

Creating and working with resource files

Formatting localized messages using resource files

Integrating localization in validation frameworks

Localizing validation messages with MiniValidation

Localizing validation messages with FluentValidation

Adding UTC support to a globalized minimal API

Summary

10

Evaluating and Benchmarking the Performance of Minimal APIs

Technical requirements

Improvements with minimal APIs

Exploring performance with load tests

Use cases

Writing k6 tests

Running a k6 performance test

Benchmarking minimal APIs with BenchmarkDotNet

Running BenchmarkDotNet

Summary

Index

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Preface

The simplification of code is every developer’s dream. Minimal APIs are a new feature in .NET 6 that aims to simplify code. They are used for building APIs with minimal dependencies in ASP.NET Core. Minimal APIs simplify API development through the use of more compact code syntax.

Developers using minimal APIs will be able to take advantage of this syntax on some occasions to work more quickly with less code and fewer files to maintain. Here, you will be introduced to the main new features of .NET 6 and understand the basic themes of minimal APIs, which weren’t available in .NET 5 and previous versions. You’ll see how to enable Swagger for API documentation, along with CORS, and how to handle application errors. You will learn to structure your code better with Microsoft’s new .NET framework called Dependency Injection. Finally, you will see the performance and benchmarking improvements in .NET 6 that are introduced with minimal APIs.

By the end of this book, you will be able to leverage minimal APIs and understand in what way they are related to the classic development of web APIs.

Who this book is for

This book is for .NET developers who want to build .NET and .NET Core APIs and want to study the new features of .NET 6. Basic knowledge of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, and REST APIs is assumed.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Minimal APIs, introduces you to the motivations behind introducing minimal APIs within .NET 6. We will explain the main new features of .NET 6 and the work that the .NET team is doing with this latest version. You will come to understand the reasons why we decided to write the book.

Chapter 2, Exploring Minimal APIs and Their Advantages, introduces you to the basic ways in which minimal APIs differ from .NET 5 and all previous versions. We will explore in detail routing and serialization with System.Text.JSON. Finally, we will end with some concepts related to writing our first REST API.

Chapter 3, Working with Minimal APIs, introduces you to the advanced ways in which minimal APIs differ from .NET 5 and all previous versions. We will explore in detail how to enable Swagger for API documentation. We will see how to enable CORS and how to handle application errors.

Chapter 4, Dependency Injection in a Minimal API Project, introduces you to Dependency Injection and goes over how to use it with a minimal API.

Chapter 5, Using Logging to Identify Errors, teaches you about the logging tools that .NET provides. A logger is one of the tools that developers have to use to debug an application or understand its failure in production. The logging library has been built into ASP.NET with several features enabled by design.

Chapter 6, Exploring Validation and Mapping, will teach you how to validate incoming data to an API and how to return any errors or messages. Once the data is validated, it can be mapped to a model that will then be used to process the request.

Chapter 7, Integration with the Data Access Layer, helps you understand the best practices for accessing and using data in minimal APIs.

Chapter 8, Adding Authentication and Authorization, looks at how to write an authentication and authorization system by leveraging our own database or a cloud service such as Azure Active Directory.

Chapter 9, Leveraging Globalization and Localization, shows you how to leverage the translation system in a minimal API project and provide errors in the same language of the client.

Chapter 10, Evaluating and Benchmarking the Performance of Minimal APIs, shows the improvements in .NET 6 and those that will be introduced with the minimal APIs.

To get the most out of this book

You will need Visual Studio 2022 with ASP.NET and a web development workload or Visual Studio Code and K6 installed on your computer.

All code examples have been tested using Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code on the Windows OS.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Basic development skills for Microsoft web technology are required to fully understand this book.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Minimal-APIs-in-ASP.NET-Core-6. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book.

You can download it here: https://packt.link/GmUNL

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “In minimal APIs, we define the route patterns using the Map* methods of the WebApplication object.”

A block of code is set as follows:

app.MapGet("/hello-get", () => "[GET] Hello World!"); app.MapPost("/hello-post", () => "[POST] Hello World!"); app.MapPut("/hello-put", () => "[PUT] Hello World!"); app.MapDelete("/hello-delete", () => "[DELETE] Hello World!");

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

if (app.Environment.IsDevelopment()) {     app.UseSwagger();     app.UseSwaggerUI(); }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

dotnet new webapi -minimal -o Chapter01

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Open Visual Studio 2022 and from the main screen, click on Create a new project.”

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

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Preface

Preface

Part 1: Introduction

In the first part of the book, we want to introduce you to the context of the book. We will explain the basics of minimal APIs and how they work. We want to add, brick by brick, the knowledge needed to take advantage of all the power that minimal APIs can grant us.

We will cover the following chapters in this part:

Chapter 1, Introduction to Minimal APIsChapter 2, Exploring Minimal APIs and Their AdvantagesChapter 3, Working with Minimal APIs