but some features shown are available only with the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio. It will be mentioned where the Enterprise edition is needed. Visual Studio 2015 requires the Windows operating system. Windows 8.1 or later is required.
To build and run WPF applications shown in this book, you need a Windows platform. Running WPF applications is still supported on Windows 7.
For building Universal Windows apps, you can use Windows 8.1 with Visual Studio, but for testing and running these apps, you need a Windows 10 device.
This book starts by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET in Chapter 1 to give you the background you need to write managed code. You’ll get an overview about the different application types and learn how to compile with the new development environment CLI. After that, the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas.
Part I: The C# Language
This section gives a good grounding in the C# language. This section doesn’t presume knowledge of any particular language, although it does assume you are an experienced programmer. You start by looking at C#’s basic syntax and data types and then explore the object-oriented features of C# before looking at more advanced C# programming topics like delegates, lambda expressions, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), reflection, and asynchronous programming.
Part II: .NET Core and Windows Runtime
This section starts with tools, and it looks at the main integrated development environment (IDE) utilized by C# developers worldwide: Visual Studio 2015. You’ll learn about the tools available with the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio in Chapter 17, “Visual Studio 2015.”
You also learn what’s behind the C# compiler and how you can use the .NET Compiler Platform to change your code programmatically in Chapter 18, “.NET Compiler Platform.”
When you’re creating functionality with C# code, don’t skip the step of creating unit tests. It takes more time in the beginning, but over time you’ll see advantages when you add functionality and maintain code. Chapter 19, “Testing,” covers creating unit tests, web tests, and coded UI tests.
Chapters 20 to 28 cover topics from .NET Core and the Windows Runtime that are independent of application types. In Chapter 20, “Diagnostics and Application Insights,” you’ll learn writing diagnostic information from the application that can also be used in the production environment. Chapters 21, “Tasks and Parallel Programming,” and 22, “Task Synchronization,” cover parallel programming using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) as well as various objects for synchronization. In Chapter 23, “Files and Streams,” you’ll read about accessing the file system and reading files and directories. Using streams, you’ll learn using both streams from the System.IO namespace and streams from the Windows Runtime for programming Windows apps. Chapter 24, “Security,” makes use of streams when you learn about security and how to encrypt data and allow for secure conversion. You’ll also learn the core foundation of networking using sockets, as well as using higher-level abstractions like the HttpClient (Chapter 25, “Networking”). Chapter 26, “Composition,” covers Microsoft Composition that allows creating independence between containers and parts. In Chapter 27, “XML and JSON,” you learn about serializing objects into XML and JSON, as well as different techniques for reading and writing XML. Finally, in Chapter 28, “Localization,” you learn to localize applications using techniques for localizations that are important both for Windows and web applications.
Part III: Windows Apps
This section is about building applications with XAML – both Universal Windows apps and WPF. You’ll learn about the foundation of XAML in Chapter 29, “Core XAML,” with the XAML syntax, dependency properties, and also markup extensions where you can create your own XAML syntax. In Chapter 30, “XAML Styles and Resources,” you learn about styling your XAML-based apps. A big focus on the MVVM (model-view-view model) pattern is in Chapter 31, “Patterns with XAML Apps.” Here you learn to take advantage of the data-binding features of XAML-based applications, which allow sharing a lot of code between UWP apps and WPF applications. You can also share a lot of code for developing for the iPhone and Android platforms using Xamarin. However, developing with Xamarin is not covered in this book. After the introductory chapters covering both UWP apps and WPF applications, two chapters cover the specific features of UWP apps, and two chapters cover WPF applications. In Chapters 32, “Windows Apps: User Interfaces,” and 33, “Advanced Windows Apps,” you learn about specific XAML controls with UWP apps such as the RelativePanel and AdaptiveTrigger, the new compiled binding, and the application life cycle, sharing data, and creating background tasks. Chapters 34, “Windows Desktop Applications with WPF,” and 35, “Creating Documents with WPF,” go into WPF-specific features such as the Ribbon control, TreeView to show hierarchical data, WPF-specific data binding features, creating flow and fixed documents, and creating XML Paper Specification (XPS) files.
This section is concluded with deployment in Chapter 36 to deploy WPF applications using ClickOnce, and information to get UWP apps in the store.
Part IV: Web Applications and Services
In this section you look at web applications and services. You’ll find two chapters about ADO.NET in this section as well. Although you can use ADO.NET (Chapter 37, “ADO.NET”) and the Entity Framework (Chapter 38, “Entity Framework Core”) from client applications as well, typically these technologies are used on the server, and you invoke services from the client.
In Chapter 39, “Windows Services,” you can read how to create your own Windows services that run when the operating system is started.
The new version of ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core 1.0, is covered in Chapter 40. Here you can read the foundation of ASP.NET and get ideas on how ASP.NET MVC 6 is built using these foundations. The features of ASP.NET MVC 6 are covered in Chapter 41.
NOTE ASP.NET Web Forms are not covered in this book, although ASP.NET 4.6 offers new features for ASP.NET Web Forms. This book fully concentrates on the new version of ASP.NET technologies using ASP.NET Core 1.0. For information about ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 5 you should read Professional C# 5 and .NET 4.5.1.
Chapter 42 covers the REST service features of ASP.NET MVC 6: ASP.NET Web API. Publish and subscribe technologies for web applications, in the form of using the ASP.NET technologies WebHooks and SignalR, are covered in Chapter 43. Chapter 44 discusses an older technology for communication with services using SOAP and WCF.
Again, like the previous section, this section concludes with deployment – deployment of websites running on Internet Information Server (IIS) or using Microsoft Azure to host websites.
To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what’s happening, a number of conventions are used throughout the book.
WARNINGS Warnings hold important, not-to-be-forgotten information that is directly relevant to the surrounding text.
NOTE Notes indicate notes, tips, hints, tricks, and/or asides to the current discussion.
As for styles in the text:
• We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.
• We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.
• We show filenames, URLs, and code within the text like so: persistence.properties.
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