Today we present a list of .NET programming books whose authors are recognized experts, carefully selected by professional publishers, and highly motivated to write hundreds of pages to thoroughly cover a programming topic.

The .NET Books That Will Improve Your Skills

Murach’s ASP.NET Core MVC (2nd Edition)
This 2nd Edition of Murach’s ASP.NET Core MVC does a better job than ever of delivering the skills you need to develop websites using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern with ASP.NET Core. If you know the basics of C#, you’ll quickly learn to code the way today’s top web professionals do. Each section features clear, beginner-friendly examples and easy-to-understand explanations that walk you through crucial skills, best practices, and helpful tips.

SQL Server Database Programming with Java: Concepts, Designs and Implementations
This textbook covers both fundamental and advanced Java database programming techniques for beginning and experienced students as well as programmers (courses related to database programming in Java with Apache NetBeans IDE 12 environment). A sample SQL Server 2019 Express database, CSE_DEPT, is created and implemented in all example projects throughout this textbook.

Over 40 real sample database programming projects are covered in this textbook with detailed illustrations and explanations to help students understand the key techniques and programming technologies. Chapters include homework and selected solutions to strengthen and improve students’ learning and understanding for topics they study in the classroom.

Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6
Software architecture is the practice of implementing structures and systems that streamline the software development process and improve the quality of an app. This fully revised and expanded third edition, featuring the latest features of .NET 6 and C# 10, enables you to acquire the key skills, knowledge, and best practices required to become an effective software architect.

Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6, Third Edition features new chapters that describe the importance of the software architect, microservices with ASP.NET Core, and analyzing the architectural aspects of the front-end in the applications, including the new approach of .NET MAUI. It also includes a new chapter focused on providing a short introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning using ML.NET, and updated chapters on Azure Kubernetes Service, EF Core, and Blazor.

Pro ASP.NET Core 6
Professional developers will produce leaner applications for the ASP.NET Core platform using the guidance in this best-selling book, now in its 9th edition and updated for ASP.NET Core for .NET 6. It contains detailed explanations of the ASP.NET Core platform and the application frameworks it supports. This cornerstone guide puts ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 into context and dives deep into the tools and techniques required to build modern, extensible web applications. New features and capabilities such as MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor Server, and Blazor WebAssembly are covered, along with demonstrations of how they are applied.

ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is the latest evolution of Microsoft’s ASP.NET web platform and provides a “host-agnostic” framework and a high-productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test-driven development, and powerful extensibility.

Professional C# and .NET
Experienced programmers making the transition to C# will benefit from the author’s in-depth explorations to create Web- and Windows applications using ASP.NET Core, Blazor, and WinUI using modern application patterns and new features offered by .NET including Microservices deployed to Docker images, GRPC, localization, asynchronous streaming, and much more.

The book also offers discussions of the extension of .NET to non-Microsoft platforms like OSX and Linux Explanations of the newest features in C#9, including support for record types, and enhanced support for tuples, pattern matching, and nullable reference types Integrating .NET applications with Microsoft Azure services such as Azure App Configuration, Azure Key Vault, Azure Functions, the Azure Active Directory, and others.

Meta and Microsoft share the idea of democratizing AI and its benefits. Microsoft offers developers a choice of the types of models to build on, with open and boundary models supported.

Azure customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure, the platform for the most widely adopted frontier and open models. In addition, Llama will be optimized to run locally on Windows. Windows developers will be able to use Llama by targeting the DirectML execution provider through the ONNX Runtime, allowing a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to their applications.

The new version also has more enhancements such as an upgrade for Azure Functions, along with .NET MAUI, WinUI and support for ARM64. The latest version of .NET Upgrade Assistant comes with a new feature – Azure Functions Upgrade. Developers can easily upgrade their Azure Functions project, similar to upgrading any other project, by right-clicking on the project in the Solution Explorer and selecting the Upgrade option.

By following these update steps in the tool, developers can ensure that both the project file and the Azure Functions version are updated to the latest versions available. The tool updates the feature body to leverage the new APIs, ensuring that the updated project is optimized for the latest technologies and features.

The tool also upgrades all packages referenced by the application to a comprehensive set of packages that match the target version of .NET, in addition to upgrading the target framework.

According to a survey gathering opinions on Visual Studio’s new .NET project upgrade feature, Infoq writes more. Users are encouraged to share their experiences and suggest improvements by participating in the survey.

With support for SQL databases, NoSQL key/value storage, OCI registry support, and a variety of popular languages, Spin 1.0 meets the needs of today’s full-stack developer. Spin’s applications are built with serverless APIs, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, for example. They’re also easy to build. Microsoft has integrated Fermyon Spin into its cloud offerings, and other software vendors are in the process of integrating it into their offerings.

“Cloud native development has been slow and tedious for developers. Fermyon wants to reverse that trend. We want to make serverless apps fast. Fast to develop, fast to deploy and fast to run”,

said Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon.

“With Spin, a developer can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in 66 seconds. The open source ecosystem gathering around Spin is propelled forward by WebAssembly, the underlying technology. Spin 1.0 is the culmination of a year’s development, and we could not have reached this milestone without the enthusiasm, contributions and support of this rapidly expanding community”,

he continued.

On top of its already voluminous feature set, new features in Spin 1.0 include:

– Key-value store, PostgreSQL and Redis integration enabling stateful applications

– Support for the OCI Registry standard enabling standard packaging alongside Docker images

– Support for today’s most popular programming languages including Javascript/Typescript, Python, Rust, Go, Java and .NET

– Substantial command stability improvements for a better developer experience

– Extensibility including plug-ins and trigger(s) for expanded application scope

– End-to-end testing enabling confidence in code completion and stability

The latest release provides access to the latest features and enhancements in the Java ecosystem. Hilla 2.0 also includes an improved TypeScript generator, support for reactive endpoint web sockets, support for native GraalVM images, a simplified theming mechanism, and a new SSO Kit.

With Hilla’s new reactive endpoint feature, developers can send data to clients in a stream without using the usual HTTP request-response model.

Another important addition to Hilla 2.0 is support for GraalVM Native image. This feature includes hints for the AOT compiler required by Spring Boot to build a GraalVM native image. Native images offer faster boot times and lower memory usage compared to JVM-based applications. Developers can build a local native image through Maven and use the build packages to create a container for production deployment.

Hilla 2.0 also includes simplified theming, a new SSO Kit for quickly adding single sign-on capabilities to Hilla applications, and an improved TypeScript generator. The SSO Kit enables integration with third-party identity providers such as Okta, Keycloak and Azure Active Directory. It also provides all the configuration needed to add single sign-on capabilities to Hilla applications based on OpenID Connect.

Model Serving removes the complexity of building and maintaining a sophisticated infrastructure for intelligent applications. Organizations can now use the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to integrate real-time machine learning systems into their business, from personalized recommendations to customer service chatbots, without the need to configure and manage the underlying infrastructure.

Deep integration within the Lakehouse Platform offers linearity of data and models, management and monitoring across the entire ML lifecycle – from experimentation to training and production. Databricks Model Serving is now generally available on AWS and Azure.

“Databricks Model Serving accelerates data science teams’ path to production by simplifying deployments, reducing overhead and delivering a fully integrated experience directly within the Databricks Lakehouse,”

said Patrick Wendell, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Databricks.

“This offering will let customers deploy far more models, with lower time to production, while also lowering the total cost of ownership and the burden of managing complex infrastructure”,

he continued.

With the opportunities surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI) taking center stage, businesses feel the urgency to prioritize AI investments across the board. Leveraging AI/ML enables organizations to uncover insights from their data, make accurate, instant predictions that deliver business value, and drive new AI-led experiences for their customers.

For example, AI can enable a bank to quickly identify and combat fraudulent charges on a customer’s account or give a retailer the ability to instantly suggest complementary accessories based on a customer’s clothing purchases. Most of these experiences are integrated in real-time applications.

However, implementing these real-time ML systems has remained a challenge for many organizations because of the burden placed on ML experts to design and maintain infrastructure that can dynamically scale to meet demand.

Databricks Model Serving removes the complexity of building and operating these systems and offers native integrations across the lakehouse, including Databricks’ Unity Catalog, Feature Store and MLflow. It delivers a highly available, low latency service for model serving, giving businesses the ability to easily integrate ML predictions into their production workloads.

Fully managed by Databricks, Model Serving quickly scales up from zero and back down as demand changes, reducing operational costs and ensuring customers pay only for the compute they use.

Digital transformation in organizations has led to workloads moving to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies including containers, microservices, serverless, etc.

Enterprises are in dire need of monitoring capabilities such as application performance management (APM), infrastructure monitoring, log management, error tracking, and more to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their applications and infrastructure.

Partnership with New Relic
New Relic, a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for 10 consecutive years in application performance management and observability, is one such Azure partner.

“Observability is essential in today’s modern, multi-cloud world. Whether our customers are running applications in data centers, spanning the public cloud, or operating at the edge, they need observability to be able to review all of these systems. Today’s news brings together more than a decade of innovation between New Relic and Microsoft to bring the power of full stack observability to Microsoft developers so they can accelerate enterprise cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives.”

Said Bill Staples, CEO of New Relic

Azure Native New Relic Service simplifies the efforts of developers and IT administrators to monitor their cloud applications. With this new offering, they can:

Create New Relic accounts in the cloud with just a few clicks. Azure Native New Relic Service is a fully managed offering that enables easy onboarding and eliminates the need to create and manage monitoring for your infrastructure.

Seamlessly send logs and metrics to New Relic. Integrated right into the set up experience and also as part of the configuration, you can set up automatic discovery of resources within an Azure subscription to monitor logs and metrics. You no longer need to go through the tedious process of setting up event centers and writing custom code.

Batch deploy New Relic Agent to virtual machines (VMs) and application services with a single click. Then send logs and metrics from the host infrastructure and processes to New Relic.

Get unified billing for all resources you consume in Azure, including New Relic, from the Azure marketplace.

“Application performance monitoring and observability across the entire stack are critical to cloud transformation for enterprises of all sizes. With the Azure Native New Relic service, Microsoft and New Relic together have enabled a thoughtfully integrated, seamless and premium experience for these enterprises everywhere. With just a few clicks, developers and administrators can now seamlessly set up and monitor their cloud applications using the power of New Relic on Azure.”

Said Balan Subramanian, Director of Partner Product Management, Azure Developer Experiences.

Without providing an integrated managed service, New Relic offers AWS and Google integrations and options available in their respective marketplaces.

As part of the Azure marketplace, New Relic’s service billing is consumption-based and consolidates with Azure’s spend, contributing to Azure’s consumption commitment (MACC).

In December 2021, the company released a preview of the service as a successor to its Azure DevOps cloud-based load testing service and Visual Studio 2019 load testing capabilities, which are no longer supported, Infoq wrote on the topic.

The Azure Load Testing service allows users to generate high-scale workloads without managing complex infrastructure. It integrates with Azure Monitor, including Application insights and Container insights, to capture metrics from Azure services. As a result, users can use the service for use cases such as:

• Optimizing pre-production infrastructure by planning for expected traffic and unplanned load increases.
• For Azure-based applications, the service collects detailed resource metrics to help you identify performance bottlenecks in your Azure application components.
• Automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow.
• Leverage JMeter, a popular open source workload and performance tool, by creating a JMeter-based load test.

In addition, with the GA release, Microsoft also released several Azure SDK load testing libraries for the .NET, Java, JavaScript, and Python programming languages.

Azure Load Testing is currently available in 11 regions and pricing details are available on the pricing page. In addition, more information about Azure Load Testing is available on the documentation landing page.

Infrastructure-from-Code (IfC) creates, configures, and manages cloud resources by understanding the source code of a software application without explicit description. There are 4 main approaches to Infra-from-Code: SDK-based, code annotation-based, a combination of these two approaches, and a new programming language that defines infrastructure explicitly, Infoq wrote on the topic.

The SDK-based approach allows developers to use their own code, and during deployment, tools analyze how the service’s code uses the SDK and generates the infrastructure. The SDK-based approach makes deriving usage from code more predictable, but the SDK is always a step back in leveraging new cloud features. Examples of SDK-based tools are Ampt and Nitric.

In the annotation and SDK approach, the developer annotates the code, and the tools incorporate those annotations into the framework. The main tools in this category are Encore and Shuttle. These tools can be hosted on the IfC vendor’s platform or can be integrated with third-party cloud service providers such as GCP, AWS, or Azure. Another interesting tool is AWS Chalice, which allows the creation and deployment of applications that use AWS Lambda in python.

Chef, Ansible, Puppet and Terraform are some of the first Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools and have started to enable the creation and management of cloud infrastructures. The second wave of IaC used existing programming languages (Python, Go, TypeScript) to express the same idea as the first wave tools. Puluni and CDK are the tools of this second generation.

Couchbase Capella is a fully managed database with JSON documents and key-values with SQL access and built-in full-text search, event creation and analytics. It can be distributed globally via AWS and GCP through their data centers and availability zones. In addition, the company now provides the database in Azure, allowing its customers to flexibly use Capella across all three major cloud service providers, Infoq wrote on the topic.

The company made the service available first on AWS and has since made several enhancements to the DBaaS offering, including a new developer user experience, SOC 2 Type 2 compatibility, a fully managed backend designed for mobile, IoT and edge applications with App Services, and a new Magma HD storage engine that gives customers the ability to support more use cases with much larger data sets at high speed.

Microsoft offers Azure Cosmos DB, a competitive service comparable to Couchbase Capella. Couchbase previously compared the two offerings, with several differences, such as that Capella is memory-based, while CosmosDB is caching-based, and consumption is on a per-node basis versus per-unit queries.

Finally, developers can try out Capella by signing up for a 30-day period. Finally, customers who want to use Capella in Azure can purchase the offering from the Azure marketplace.