#100DaysOfCode - Day 100: C# 10, .NET6 Journey, and gRPC

Hi folks!

So, today is my last day of #100DaysOfCode, and I wanted to post about the newest thing I’ll be learning about this holiday season, which I’ve already started looking into - .C# 10, .NET 6, and finally: gRPC - a technology to bridge the gap between these new technologies, and legacy ASP.NET apps which might not be worthwhile to migrate to the newer frameworks.

While I’ve been in the .NET ecosystem off and on since I first learned development, I haven’t spent a lot of time in the the new technology side of it for a while (besides developing a secret santa web app in Blazor server last year), since Microsoft did this hard fork of ASP.NET, and made things pretty much entirely imcompatible with any older versions, with the exception of very core libraries. I’ve been using legacy ASP.NET heavily in the workplace, and separately, some python for data analysis here and there in work settings, so I’m really motivated to learn about how I can start using newer technologies without going through the very tedious effort of translating older code that might be better off shelving. I’ve been working on figuring out ways to migrate to the newer, open-source, .NET, but have found roadblock after roadblock. So I want to learn how to use it alongside the old, and what better way to learn to do that, than at home whilst I’m pushing towards it in the workplace?

Enter: my first .NET book since my first one learning ASP.NET 5 years ago: AMZN: C# 10 and .NET 6. It comes with the source code solutions on github for free, which were very useful things to have in my first journey learning ASP.NET (back when I worked at Schneider Electric). It also comes with a variety of exercises and code templates that I can run and fiddle with, which is quite necessary as I’m a hands on learner. So, I’m planning to go through and do that this holiday season. The most notable of the chapters to learn is .NET Core Web API, JSON based formats in .NET core (I’ve always used JSON.NET, but am told core is faster), and finally: gRPC.

• Web API is a structure of endpoints on a website that you can hit with data to get different data (authenticated or not).
• JSON is a format to encode and decode things, whether locally or on web (it’s almost always in web)
• gRPC is a non-web framework (?) to allow different languages such as C# in ASP.NET / C# in .NET Core / Python / etc to communicate.

My plan is to develop and deploy a new API for use in .NET, which I want to be able to use alongside Python (using gRPC or another mechanism) for playing around with my favorite little technologies. I’ve never used python web services (I’ve ALWAYS just used python for data), so I’m hoping that gRPC might be a way that I don’t need to learn how to set one up, and can instead use C# as the front-end - Python only for some data realted backend stuff.

So, it’ll be an interesting journey to work on the intersection of two different technologies, and learn how I can get them to speak.

P.S. If you’re antsy and want a deep dive into gRPC, check out this PDF of Ch. 18. And if you want a summary, stay tuned for a future post on the exciting concept