Operating Systems

Since June 27, 2016 Microsoft made a leap into the world of cross platform. They released .NET Core which runs on several operating systems. In this course we’ll be focusing on Windows 10. However, you can easily follow along if you’re running on Mac OS X

Basic C# Knowledge

Basic knowledge of C# is required. I’ll be covering topics that go beyond syntax. You don’t have to be an expert, you just need to have the basic understanding of C# Syntax.

Database

Although I will be demoing diagrams to visualize the data. The goal will be focused on writing the code for the Restful API. Unfortunately, databases are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

We’ll be using a technique built-in to Entity Framework called “Code First” Approach. This will build the database for us using Data Migrations. Both Mac OS & Windows come with their own version of a lightweight database that we’ll use by default.

If you’re comfortable or you’re more familiar with a different database and want to use databases such as:

• Postgres
• Oracle
• SQL Server Developer Edition
• etc.

I’ll include resources to help you implement the correct configuration. The code we’ll be writing is cross-platform.

Development Tools

In this tutorial we’ll be using Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. If you happen to have a Visual Studio License you’re more than welcome to use the paid edition. I’ll be focusing on free tools.

Visual Studio is downloadable for both Windows and Mac OS.

The code we’ll be creating will run on both Windows 10 & Mac OS without a problem. If you don’t already have Visual Studio Community Edition installed, take some time to download and install it on your machine.

Optional Tools

Web Browsers:

• Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox
• Chrome Canary

We won’t be using any of the debugging tools so it really doesn’t matter which browser you’re using.

LinqPad (optional for Windows Only) - Learning LinqPad is beyond the scope of this tutorial. I won’t be covering LinqPad. However, I will be using it to demonstrate some Linq & Lambda expressions to get a better understanding on this topic. It’s a great tool but it's completely optional.

Postman (optional) - If you’re familiar with Postman and you would rather use it please feel free to do so. We’ll be using Swagger for API Documentation and Browser Based UI API Client.

Once again, if you already have some of these tools installed and you decided to use them, take some time to update them to the latest version.