Microsoft .NET is a programming technology that greatly simplifies application development, both for traditional, proprietary applications and for web-based applications and services. The original .NET was a complete restructuring of Microsoft’s whole system infrastructure and represented a major learning challenge for programmers developing applications on Microsoft platforms. Part of .NET included a major new object-oriented programming language, C#. But learning the new programming language is only part of the challenge. The much greater challenge is learning the .NET Class Library and its many capabilities.

A major new restructuring of the .NET platform, .NET Core is cross-platform, open source, and modular designed for creating modern web applications and services, libraries and console applications. It is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. .NET now is a family of frameworks, including both the classical .NET available on Windows and the new .NET Core package-based frameworks that are cross-platform. This course is designed to run on .NET 8.0, which is the current LTS (Long Term Support) version of .NET Core.

This foundational two-day course is designed to provide a sound introduction to.NET for programmers who already know the C# language. It is current to Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 8.0. The course focuses on core portions of the .NET Class Library that are common across many application areas. It starts with an introduction to the architecture and key concepts of .NET. The course then discusses class libraries, packages, metapackages and frameworks.  The following chapters discuss important topics in the .NET programming model, including metadata and reflection, I/O and serialization, memory management, processes and threads. The course concludes with a chapter on threading, which includes an introduction to the Task Parallel Library (TPL).

The course is hands-on, with many programming examples. The goal is to equip you with the foundations of this important new technology from Microsoft. The student will receive a comprehensive set of materials, including course notes and all the programming examples.