– .NET Core is open source and runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux

– The front-end is using Angular 2 and the back-end is using ASP .NET Core

– Differences between ASP .NET Core, .NET Core and picking a programming language

– .NET lets you write your program in multiple languages (C#, F# and VB.Net)

– Jamie picked C# primarily due to previous experience using it

– Jamie learns best by audio / video but also by building real projects

– Learning by example vs learning by theory

– Discworld is a series of comic fantasy books

– The world is a disc held up by 4 elephants standing on a turtle swimming in space

– Jame’s app lets you search for Discworld books, characters and locations

– He built the app to help him figure out which books he already has

– The search is handled by a free and open source RESTful API

– The API uses Swagger

– ASP .NET Core lets you pick server side templates or an API back-end

– Jamie wanted to learn a new front-end tool so he went API based with Angular 2

– The front-end and back-end take a few seconds to warm up due to Azure’s free tier

– That spin up time is similar to Heroku’s free tier and also how IIS works

– SQLite is being used to store the books and everything else on the back-end

– The API has a delete database endpoint but it’s protected by a strong password

– Entity Framework Core is used as an ORM (Object-relational mapper)

– Subtle differences between different databases like PostgreSQL and SQLite

– Maybe dropping EF Core for Dapper which is a light weight ORM

– Trade offs between using a high powered ORM and writing raw SQL

– The code itself uses the LINQ library from Microsoft to query the data

– The code base is 18 months old and it doesn’t use Docker, but it might soon

– Azure’s free tier (at the time) gave you free resources but you didn’t pick the specs

– Microsoft is very open about their platform, you can even visit their data centers

– Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vs Platform as a Service (PaaS)

– You get free SSL certificates with Azure’s PaaS offering on their domain

– You can use a custom domain name with Azure’s paid plans

– Walking through the deploy process from development to production

– After pushing to GitHub, AppVeyor (CI / CD) takes over and deploys it to Azure

– AppVeyor was used because Azure Pipelines wasn’t really around yet

– Using a third party CI / CD tool has less vendor lock-in too

– .NET Core rolls everything up into a single binary file that can be deployed

– Both the API back-end and Angular front-end have separate binary files

– Having single binary deployments makes it easier to manage deploys

– Most folks can run his project as long as you have the .NET Core run-time installed

– Jamie uses VSCode and JetBrains Rider instead of Visual Studio

– Dealing with Azure database backups using a real DB server and SQLite

– There is monitoring that keeps track of delete actions from the back-end API

– This delete action API endpoint wouldn’t be used for client work or a “real” project

– Jamie still uses his own app today to help keep track of which books he has

– Best tips? Focus on the data relationships before writing your code

– Switching the API from Discworld to Stephen King books, it works!

– You can find Jamie on GitHub and