Building a .NET Core Web API: A Step-by-Step Tutorial:
As a developer, you may be familiar with building web applications using .NET. But have you considered building a Web API? A Web API is an application programming interface that enables you to interact with other applications, allowing you to share data, logic, and functionality between applications. .NET Core Web API is a powerful tool that allows developers to build Web APIs using .NET Core, a free, open-source framework developed by Microsoft. In this tutorial, we'll explore the steps to building a .NET Core Web API.
What is .NET Core Web API? .NET Core is a free, open-source framework developed by Microsoft for building web applications and services. .NET Core Web API is a tool that allows developers to build web APIs using the .NET Core framework. Web APIs are used to interact with other applications or services, allowing developers to share data, logic, and functionality between applications. A .NET Core Web API is built using the same tools and libraries as a traditional .NET web application, but with a specific focus on providing a lightweight, scalable interface for other applications to consume.
Benefits of .NET Core Web API There are many benefits to building a .NET Core Web API. For starters, .NET Core Web API is an open-source technology, which means that developers can access and modify the code as needed. Additionally, .NET Core Web API is designed to be lightweight and modular, which allows developers to build highly scalable and efficient web APIs. Finally, .NET Core Web API is cross-platform, which means that it can be run on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Step 1: Create a new .NET Core Web API project To get started with building a .NET Core Web API, you'll need to have the .NET Core SDK installed on your computer. You can download the .NET Core SDK for your operating system from the .NET website. Once you have the SDK installed, you can create a new .NET Core Web API project using the following command in your terminal or command prompt:
dotnet new webapi -n MyWebAPI
This command creates a new .NET Core Web API project named "MyWebAPI" with some basic boilerplate code, including a Startup.cs file that contains the configuration for your application.
Step 2: Add a controller and an endpoint Now that you have a new .NET Core Web API project, it's time to build your first endpoint. Endpoints are the URLs that clients can use to access the functionality of your Web API. To create an endpoint, you'll need to create a new controller. In .NET Core Web API, a controller is a class that handles incoming HTTP requests and returns an HTTP response. You can create a new controller by adding a new class file to your project with the suffix "Controller". For example, you could create a new ValuesController.cs file to handle requests to an endpoint that returns a list of values.
[ApiController]
[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class ValuesController : ControllerBase
{
private static readonly string[] _values = new[]
{
"value1", "value2", "value3"
};
[HttpGet]
public ActionResult<IEnumerable<string>> Get()
{
return _values;
}
}
In this example, the [Route("api/[controller]")] attribute sets the URL for the controller to /api/values, and the [HttpGet] attribute specifies that this action method should handle HTTP GET requests to the URL. The Get() method returns an ActionResult of type IEnumerable<string>, which in this case is an array of two string values.
Youtube Tutorial: https://youtu.be/h0KG8OKKgKs?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oVjOKgzsWqdFVvzGL2_d72
