I got my feet wet with C# and ASP.NET development via Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core 101 video series. After seeing ASP.NET and .NET in various job postings, I wanted to see what it was like developing with it.
This was my first ever foray into C#, and I was hoping ASP.NET, Blazor, and Razor were analogous enough to the Javascript and MERN stack development I’ve learned so far to allow me to pick up on it quickly.
Initial thoughts:
- I’m coming from Javascript, and I haven’t worked with C/C++/Java since university, so coming back to a typed language is interesting. The verbosity can be annoying sometimes, but I do enjoy the extra checking - both from the language, and from myself reading over code and explicitly seeing the types.
- There is a lot of ‘magic’ happening. I need to keep in mind that this is an entire prescriptive framework and not just libraries and methods.
- Annotations feel weird to me. This is not a bad or good thing; just a thing. React and its jsx sugar that mimics HTML felt really elegant. Although, I am learning to enjoy the explicitness of the annotations.
- I may need to learn how to develop an ASP.NET project without using Visual Studio to gain more insight on what’s happening.
- Getting the hang of it: .razor pages/files seem analogous to .jsx - just means I need to be prepared to see a mix of HTML and C#
My repo following the video is here
I’m going to follow the Blazor for Beginners playlist next. The ASP.NET 101 series was a good high-level introduction, but I’m actually still not quite sure where ASP.NET ends, and where Blazor begins.