Before you begin: Join our book community on Discord – Introduction

by Ron Mutschler ASP.NET Certifications, Feature attribution methods, Knowing Vertex AI feature store, Limitations of Explainable AI, Understanding the web

Give your feedback straight to the author himself and chat to other early readers on our Discord server (find the “architecting-aspnet-core-apps-3e” channel under EARLY ACCESS SUBSCRIPTION).

https://packt.link/EarlyAccess

The goal of this book is not to create yet another design pattern book; instead, the chapters are organized according to scale and topic, allowing you to start small with a solid foundation and build slowly upon it, just like you would build a program.Instead of a guide covering a few ways of applying a design pattern, we will explore the thought processes behind the systems we are designing from a software engineer’s point of view.This is not a magic recipe book; from experience, there is no magical recipe when designing software; there are only your logic, knowledge, experience, and analytical skills. Let’s define “experience” as your past successes and failures. And don’t worry, you will fail during your career, but don’t get discouraged by it. The faster you fail, the faster you can recover and learn, leading to successful products. Many techniques covered in this book should help you achieve success. Everyone has failed and made mistakes; you aren’t the first and certainly won’t be the last. To paraphrase a well-known saying by Roosevelt: the people that never fail are the ones who never do anything.At a high level:

  • This book explores basic patterns, unit testing, architectural principles, and some ASP.NET Core mechanisms.
  • Then, we move up to the component scale, exploring patterns oriented toward small chunks of software and individual units.
  • After that, we move to application-scale patterns and techniques, exploring ways to structure an application.
  • Some subjects covered throughout the book could have a book of their own, so after this book, you should have plenty of ideas about where to continue your journey into software architecture.

Here are a few pointers about this book that are worth mentioning:

  • The chapters are organized to start with small-scale patterns and then progress to higher-level ones, making the learning curve easier.
  • Instead of giving you a recipe, the book focuses on the thinking behind things and shows the evolution of some techniques to help you understand why the shift happened.
  • Many use cases combine more than one design pattern to illustrate alternate usage so you can understand and use the patterns efficiently. This also shows that design patterns are not beasts to tame but tools to use, manipulate, and bend to your will.
  • As in real life, no textbook solution can solve all our problems; real problems are always more complicated than what’s explained in textbooks. In this book, I aim to show you how to mix and match patterns to think “architecture” instead of giving you step-by-step instructions to reproduce.

The rest of the introduction chapter introduces the concepts we explore throughout the book, including refreshers on a few notions. We also touch on .NET, its tooling, and some technical requirements.In this chapter, we cover the following topics:

  • What is a design pattern?
  • Anti-patterns and code smell.
  • Understanding the web – request/response.
  • Getting started with .NET.