My new book Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap is coming out soon

I'm so excited to announce that I just sent to the my editor the final chapter of my upcoming book Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap. Which means that in a few months you will be able to get your hands on it.

What is the book about

The book covers a series of technologies that are important to master in modern front-end development with ASP.NET Core. I'm not talking only about Angular and Boostrap, but also about WebPack, Gulp, TypeScript, Node.js, Bower, Nuget and NPM.

This book is meant as a reference for backend ASP.NET developers which still have to make the step to the mix of technologies that is modern front-end development. But it also good for front-end developers that come from other technologies and never used Visual Studio: they will learn how Visual Studio 2017 helps a lot with common task. And also they will learn how to developer ASP.NET applications on a Mac.

It has 9 chapters, one per type of technology or tool

  • ASP.NET Core MVC
  • A general overview of modern front-end development
  • Angular
  • Bootstrap
  • Package Managers (Nuget, NPM, Bower)
  • Build tools and task runners (WebPack and Gulp)
  • Deployment on-prem and to Azure
  • How to develop without Visual Studio
  • A sample that combines all these technologies

Each of the chapters start explaining the library or technology by itself, and later shows how it works in the context of ASP.NET Core development and what Visual Studio 2017 helps doing faster or without errors.

A bit of behind the scene

Writing this book was a massive effort because of the constant changes in the technologies I'm covering. I started writing the book in summer 2015, when ASP.NET Core was called ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET Core MVC was called MVC 6 and the only cross-platform compiler was called dnx and was only for web development. Angular was called AngularJS v1, Bootstrap 3 was still in beta and Grunt was the main task runner, Gulp a rising star and Bower was the package manager for front-end components.

Then ASP.NET 5 became ASP.NET Core... all the .NET went cross-platform as .NET Core, they went from the beloved JSON-based configuration file back to the csproj file. But ASP.NET Core was "final" only in the libraries, but not in the tools, so I had to wait for the ASP.NET Core tooling to go RTW, which happened only this spring with Visual Studio 2017. In the meantime, Bootstrap 3 became stable, and v4 was still in alpha, Angular 2 was released, Grunt felt out of grace and WebPack came to the scene. So not only I had to update the bits about ASP.NET Core, but had to completely rewrite the chapter on Angular, add some new content on WebPack and get rid of Grunt.

While I was updating all of these, ASP.NET Core v2.0 was released, this August. Luckily nothing major changed since this summer (apart from Angular becoming v4 and soon to be v5 but with little or no fundamental changes) so I just finished the last chapter that combines everything which I had left as last to avoid rewriting it zillion times.

A funny thing: when I started the book I asked Mads Kristensen from Microsoft if he wanted to be my Tech Editor, and he declined because he was about to become father soon and would not have had time for that. And now his kid is almost 2yo... But Mads is providing the preface to the book, so no all was lost.

What's next

I just have to complete some last minute changes and then the book will be sent to print (and eBook production). And I'll finally be able to conclude this 2 year and half project.

I'll post more about the book the it goes into publishing and the release date, now set for 8th January, becomes certain.