Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core: Build, test, and prototype web APIs quickly using .NET and C#

Get a practical understanding of how to build lightweight ASP.NET Core applications and write cleaner, testable, and secure APIs with .NET 6 and Minimal APIs

Key Features

• Explore clear and detailed guidelines to design and develop APIs for ASP.NET Core apps
• Discover expert tips, tricks, and best practices to build performant APIs
• Implement proven web API development methodologies using .NET 6 features and tools

Book Description

The Minimal APIs feature, introduced in .NET 6, is the answer to code complexity and rising dependencies in creating even the simplest of APIs. Minimal APIs facilitate API development using compact code syntax and help you develop web APIs quickly.

This practical guide explores Minimal APIs end-to-end and helps you take advantage of its features and benefits for your ASP.NET Core projects. The chapters in this book will help you speed up your development process by writing less code and maintaining fewer files using Minimal APIs. You’ll also learn how to enable Swagger for API documentation along with CORS and handle application errors. The book even promotes ideas to structure your code in a better way using the dependency injection library in .NET. Finally, you'll learn about performance and benchmarking improvements for your apps.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to fully leverage new features in .NET 6 for API development and explore how Minimal APIs are an evolution over classical web API development in ASP.NET Core.

What you will learn

• Adopt new features in .NET 6 for building lightweight APIs
• Understand how to optimize API development with Minimal APIs in .NET 6
• Discover best practices for accessing and using data in Minimal APIs
• Understand how to validate incoming data to an API and return error messages
• Get familiar with dependency injection and logging for identifying errors
• Leverage the translation system in Minimal APIs to provide messages and errors in regional languages

Who this book is for

If you are an existing .NET developer who wants to develop lightweight APIs quickly without much complexity, this book is for you. If you are a developer who is just getting started with the ASP.NET Core framework, this book will help you learn web API development using the latest .NET features. The book assumes intermediate-level knowledge of C# programming, Visual Studio, and REST API concepts.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Minimal APIs
2. Exploring Minimal APIs and Their Advantages
3. Working with Minimal APIs
4. Dependency Injection in a Minimal API Project
5. Using Logging to Identify Errors
6. Exploring Validation and Mapping
7. Integration with the Data Access Layer
8. Adding Authentication and Authorization
9. Leveraging Globalization and Localization
10. Evaluating and Benchmarking the Performance of Minimal APIs

Andrea Tosato is a full-stack software engineer and architect on .NET applications. Andrea successfully develops .NET applications in various industries, facing sometimes complex technological challenges. He deals with desktop, web, mobile development but with the arrival of the cloud, Azure, it becomes his passion. In 2017 he co-founded Cloudgen Verona, a .NET community based in Verona, Italy, with his friend Marco Zamana. In 2019 he is named Microsoft MVP for the first time for the Azure category. Andrea graduated from the University of Pavia with a degree in computer engineering in 2008 and successfully completed his master's degree, also in computer engineering, in Modena in 2011. Andrea was born in 1986 in Verona, Italy, where he currently works as a remote worker. You can find Andrea on Twitter.

Computer enthusiast since elementary school, when he receives an old Commodore VIC-20 as a gift, Marco Minerva begins developing with GW-BASIC. After some experiences with Visual Basic, he has been using .NET since its first introduction. He got his master's degree in Information Technology in 2006. Today he proudly lives in Taggia, Italy, works as a freelance consultant and is involved in designing and developing solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem, building applications for Desktop, Mobile and Web. His greatest expertise is backend development as a software architect. He holds training courses. He is a speaker at technical events, writes articles for magazines and regularly makes live streaming about coding on Twitch. He is a Microsoft MVP since 2013. You can find Marco on Twitter.

Emanuele is a Microsoft 365 Architect, passionate about frontend technologies and everything related to the cloud, especially Microsoft Azure. He is currently living in Zurich and actively participating in local and international community activities and events. Emanuele shares his love for technology through his blog. He has also became a Twitch Affiliate as a live coder and you can follow him at kasuken to write some code with him. Since 2014 Emanuele is a Microsoft MVP in the Developer Technologies category and since 2022 he is a GitHub Star. You can find Emanuele on Twitter.