I’ve been working with .Net for a 11 years now. First starting out with Winforms VB.Net, moving over to ASP.Net Web Forms. More recently I’ve worked with both ASP.Net MVC and stood up a couple REST services with WebAPI. It’s safe to say I’m comfortable in Visual Studio.

Recently the Microsoft Team in Redmond have been busy. With the recent release of .Net Core, things are getting pretty exciting in .Net land. They’ve also open sourced .Net Core. I’ve been focusing my off-work learning efforts into learning more front-end topics lately. Things like React and Flexbox. More recently I decided to look at what .Net Core has to offer…and I’m excited.

My first step was to head to Microsoft Virtual Academy. Maria Naggaga and Scott Hanselman (and I’m sure a team of others) put together a free course. Introduction to ASP.NET Core 1.0. I’m glad I found this course, I think it’s a nice place to start.

The pace of the video course isn’t fast and furious. I think if you’re already comfortable being productive in ASP.Net Core you could skip it. If you are looking for a solid foundation, as I was, I would recommend watching. It’s free and didn’t take that long to work through (plan for around 4-5 hours).

A cool thing that happened during the course is they switched over to GitHub. They didn’t do this to contribute, or search for a library to use. They did it to look up framework code they were using. So they’d make a call to something in ASP.Net, wonder how what they were calling is implemented, and go look at it. This is an awesome benefit of .Net being open source.

Not only is it pretty sweet to look up the code you’re using, but I can think of another huge benefit. It’s a good learning opportunity. The code may be Open Source. Yet It’s safe to assume the code quality is high. I’m looking forward to diving in and looking at how some smart people solved problems.

The course hasn’t been completely released. The part I’ve watch was the “Introduction” day. According to Scott’s blog post on the course we can expect two more days. “Intermediate” and “Cross-Platform”. So that’s something to look forward to. I’m hoping they cover Dependency Injection and Testing in the next day.

This is a great place to start. Now I’m itching to actually build something. I’m very much a learn-by-doing type of person. What I’d like to build I’m not quite sure yet. So if you have any suggestions please let me know on Twitter.

Joe