Morning Dew Quick Review – Chris Woodruff’s Networking Programming with C#

I recently got an eBook copy of Beyond Boundaries – Networking Programming with C# 12 and .NET 8 from Chris Woodruff, and I had a chance to browse the book and read a few of the chapters in more detail this weekend.

Chris decided to self-publish this book on Leanpub, and it was released less than a month ago. If you follow his blog, you may have seen that he wrote the book in the open, releasing content from chapters as they were finished. When you buy an eBook on Leanpub, the other sets a suggested price and a minimum price, and you can adjust what you pay based on those guidelines. When you change the price, you’re shown exactly how much of the cost goes to the author.

I really like how the book is structured, and it’s one of those rare .NET books that gets deeper on topics. It’s getting harder to find books published on something more advanced than an “intro to” a topic. There are several chapters on some important fundamental concepts of networking before getting into implementations and features in .NET.

Some of the C#/.NET content later in the book includes chapters on async/await, WebSockets, REST APIs with ASP.NET Core and EF Core, WebRTC, gRPC, message queuing, and SignalR. The SignalR chapter was one of the ones I read in its entirety so far. I chose it because it’s a feature I’ve used but not for several years. I thought it would be interesting to review some chapters where I’m familiar with the topic but probably pretty rusty. The chapter provided a nice refresher for me, and I learned a few new things about debugging and scaling SignalR projects. The chapter also provides a good introduction for anyone new to SignalR.

One final note about the book’s content: Chris uses just enough diagrams and other figures to help illustrate the topics in his book, and the diagrams are excellent. You can tell he’s been a developer and architect for a long time.

I highly recommend this book to any mid-to-senior level .NET developer. If you’re newer to .NET, you should at least have a handle on the basics of C#, .NET, and maybe a little ASP.NET Core for some of the chapters. Go check out Chris’ blog for some sample content, and get your copy of this book today!