Programming Services with ASP.NET Core

Modern distributed applications need clearly defined service boundaries, robust communication patterns, and a reliable foundation for security, observability, scalability, and deployment. This hands-on training shows how to design, implement, test, and operate high-quality HTTP, streaming, and event-driven services with ASP.NET Core 10 and the .NET 10 stack (including Aspire)—on-premises or in cloud environments (Azure, Kubernetes, container platforms).

You will learn REST, gRPC, SignalR, event and background processing scenarios as well as production-ready aspects such as authentication, authorization, rate limiting, resilience, telemetry, and performance tuning (Native AOT, trimming, profile-guided optimization).

Contents

1. Architecture & Fundamentals

• Service boundary, monolith vs microservices vs modular monoliths
• Synchronous vs asynchronous, API vs events
• API gateway / reverse proxy (YARP) vs internal service discovery

2. Aspire Integration

• AppHost: composition, resources & references
• ServiceDefaults: health checks, OpenTelemetry, structured logs
• Local orchestration versus production deployment
• Integrating external resources (databases, caches, messaging)

3. REST & HTTP APIs

• Resource model, CRUD + specialized actions
• Error design (Problem Details), pagination, search patterns, ETags
• Versioning (URL / header / media type), deprecation notices
• OpenAPI 3.1: documentation, contract-first, code generation
• Filters, endpoint groups, binding, validation (FluentValidation / DataAnnotations)

4. Data Access & Persistence

• Entity Framework Core best practices (context lifetime, migration strategy)
• DDD aggregates vs anemic model
• Transactions & outbox pattern for reliable event publication
• Query optimization, caching (in-memory, distributed Redis), projections

5. Security

• Authentication: OpenID Connect / OAuth2, Entra ID, Keycloak alternatives
• Authorization: policies, claims, resource-based rules
• Protections: rate limiting, anti-forgery, input/output validation, security headers
• Secrets & configuration: user secrets, Azure Key Vault, least privilege

6. Real-time & Streaming

• SignalR: hub design, scaling (backplane, Redis)
• Server-Sent Events & WebSockets use cases
• gRPC: unary, server/client streaming, bidirectional, Protobuf design guidelines
• HTTP/3 & QUIC benefits for latency and reliability

7. Asynchronous & Event-Driven Communication

• Message broker patterns (Azure Service Bus / RabbitMQ / Kafka)
• Event sourcing vs classic persistence
• Saga / process orchestration vs choreography
• Dead-letter handling, retries, resilience policies (Polly)

8. Observability & Diagnostics

• OpenTelemetry setup (TracerProvider, MeterProvider)
• Correlating HTTP, gRPC, messaging spans
• Structured logs (JSON), Serilog / ILogger concepts
• Metrics: throughput, error rates, SLA / SLO / error budget
• Dashboards: Aspire dashboard, Grafana, Azure Monitor / Application Insights

9. Performance & Resilience

• Caching strategies (response, data, hybrid)
• Impact of Native AOT & trimming on reflection / DI
• Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) usage
• Minimizing allocations (Span, source generators)
• Resource limits & rate limiting, circuit breaker, bulkhead

10. Quality & Testing

• Test pyramid: unit, integration, contract (OpenAPI/gRPC), end-to-end
• Load & stress testing (k6, Locust), chaos engineering basics
• Static analysis: analyzers, Roslyn, security scans

11. Deployment & DevOps

• Containerization: multi-stage Docker, security hardening
• Platforms: Azure Container Apps, Kubernetes (AKS), App Service
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps pipelines, environments, rollbacks
• Progressive delivery: canary, blue-green, feature flags
• Deployment with Aspire

12. Advanced Topics

• API gateway / YARP configuration, transforms & load balancing
• Source generators for DTO / mapping / DI registrations
• Integrating AI agents (Microsoft Agent Toolkit)
• Migrating legacy services to modern Minimal API / Aspire structure