I am writing a book about Razor Pages

Just over three years go, when Razor Pages was first launched, I had a number of questions from people asking whether I was going to write a book about the Razor Pages framework. I guess they asked me because Razor Pages appeared to be a natural successor to the old ASP.NET Web Pages framework, and I had written a book about that. Also, I was regularly blogging at the time about all the good things you could do with Razor Pages. The answer then was No, primarily because I was working on my own tutorial/documentation site for Razor Pages - learnrazorpages.com.

Well, things have changed. The people at Manning (publishers of the In Action series) got in touch with me, and before I knew it, I was proposing a book on Razor Pages to them, with me as the author. And now I've started writing the book.

Razor Pages In Action

ASP.NET Core Razor Pages In Action is the working title. It is currently scheduled for publication spring 2022. The book will cover working with Razor Pages to produced real-world, page-focused web applications using .NET 6, and while everything is in its relatively early stages and subject to change, the topics that I plan to cover include

  • Building, configuring, and publishing a data-driven website
  • Build a complete web application step-by-step
  • Forms for collecting and processing user data
  • Connecting to databases from a Razor Page
  • Protecting areas of a Razor Page from unauthorized access with ASP.NET Identity
  • Using Object Relational Mapping tools to work with data in Razor Pages applications
  • Generating CRUD pages using scaffolding gestures
  • Generating and sending email from your web application

The book will be a combination of tutorial and reference. I favour the "learn by doing" approach, so I propose to walk readers through the framework by helping them to build an application using various features within the framework, explaining how the features work and how you can customise them if required. The application will be built incrementally, evolving to incorporate all of the framework features listed above as they are introduced. While the book is primarily about the framework, I also plan to show you how to employ best practices, so that you can use Razor Pages to produce sustainable applications.

Although the final book won't be available until 2022, you can take advantage of Manning's Early Access Program (MEAP) to buy the book while it is being written. Not only does this program give you early access to the content of the book, but you can provide feedback to help the book become better! And to kick-start things, the marketing people at Manning have given me a discount code that you can use to save 50% off the price. Simply quote mlbrind50 when you order. But you had better hurry - it's only valid until 2nd August!