TL;DR – Pluralsight is offering a free, month-long trial during April. Sign up for your free trial here.
My regular readers and followers will know that for the last year and a half or so, I’ve been authoring and publishing online training courses for Pluralsight. I’ve just, in fact, begun work on my fourth course, “Integration Testing ASP.NET Core Applications”, which I expect to publish within the next few months.
What Is Pluralsight?
Pluralsight is recognised as one of the top digital learning platforms for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals. They host thousands of video courses and related content, covering a diverse range of topics, produced by industry experts. Their quality bar is exceptionally high in regards to both content and the video production standards.
Before becoming an author, I was a long time learner on the platform, sometimes through a personal subscription, and sometimes through a work subscription. I very much value the amazing .NET content which I’ve learned a lot from over that time. Even when funding my personal monthly subscription, I saw a return on my investment as I was able to quickly pick up concepts that I wanted to learn. As a .NET developer, there are hundreds of relevant video courses for me in the library.
Announcing Free April
Today, Pluralsight announced an unprecedented month-long free trial offer. You can now sign up for a month of access (through to the end of April), at no cost at all. No credit card required. No watch limits.
This comes at a good time for many professionals who find themselves working remotely from home.
What can you do with a free month of Pluralsight?
- Grow your career with 7,000+ expert-led video courses on top tech topics
- See where your skills stand and what you need to work on with Pluralsight IQ
- Build the right skills in the right order with paths that streamline skill development
I may be biased as an author, but honestly, this is a great deal! Even if you watch one course, you’ll likely be delighted that you did. There’s so much fantastic content for .NET and ASP.NET developers, I’m sure you’ll be watching more than one course during your trial.
My Pluralsight Courses
To date, I have three courses on the platform, all focused on my personal area of expertise, ASP.NET Core and .NET. If you haven’t yet had a chance to watch these, I hope you’ll give them a try during your free trial.
Dependency Injection in ASP.NET Core
A foundation of ASP.NET Core development is a thorough knowledge of using dependency injection. In this course, you will learn how to use the Microsoft dependency injection container in your applications. First, you will learn about registering services into the dependency injection container. Next, you will explore how to resolve those services wherever they are needed in your application. Finally, you will discover how to extend or replace the built-in container for more complex scenarios. When you are finished with this course, you will have complete knowledge of the Microsoft dependency injection container that will help you as you build well-structured ASP.NET Core and .NET applications.
Using Configuration and Options in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core Apps
When developing .NET Core applications, you will soon find that you need to configure them to control their behaviour and to connect to external resources. In this course, you will learn foundational knowledge to define configuration for your applications and to access the configured values at runtime. First, you will learn about defining configuration using JSON files, as well as how to access that configuration to control your application. Next, you will discover the options pattern which provides a type-safe way to access configuration through dependency injection and which applies the single responsibility principle. Finally, you will explore how to load configuration from a range of other sources using configuration providers. When you are finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of the configuration and options libraries needed to build well-structured, configurable ASP.NET and .NET Core applications.
Building ASP.NET Core Hosted Services and .NET Core Worker Services
Building .NET Core microservices has many advantages. In this course, you will learn when and how to apply hosted services in your applications. First, you will learn about adding hosted services to ASP.NET Core applications to perform background workloads outside of the request lifecycle. Next, you will learn how to apply the worker service template when building microservices using .NET Core. You will also learn how to build .NET Core microservices, using the worker service template introduced in .NET Core 3.0. When you are finished with this course, you will have a strong knowledge of building ASP.NET Core hosted services and using the .NET Core worker service template, which will help you as you build responsive web applications and .NET Core microservices.
COMING SOON: Integration Testing ASP.NET Core Applications: Best Practices
This course will help you build higher quality web applications. In this course, you’ll learn how to write integration tests for your ASP.NET Core applications which are run using an in-memory test server. First, you’ll explore the creation of integration test projects for your applications. Next, you’ll discover how to design unit tests which exercise web API projects. Finally, you’ll learn how to test ASP.NET Core UI applications and tackle advanced scenarios such as replacing services with mocks. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge to apply integration testing to ASP.NET Core applications, needed to rapidly develop robust, high-quality software.
If you’d like to be notified when this course is released, you can follow me on Pluralsight. I’ll also announce the course through my Twitter account where you can also follow me for course and blog updates.
What Else To Watch?
Of course; my content is the tip of the iceberg of what is available in the Pluralsight library. I don’t get as much time as I would like to watch content these days, but when I find the time, there’s always something new for me there. There is simply so much content. I recommend bookmarking courses as you see them so that you can build up your own list of courses that you want to watch.
I’d first recommend you find an applicable learning path. For example, if you’re an ASP.NET Core developer, Pluralsight has organised a learning path of courses to build up your knowledge. The ASP.NET Core learning path includes 13 courses currently. You can even take a Skill IQ test to measure your existing knowledge and to help direct you to content to fill any gaps. A further 7 courses are available in the API Development in ASP.NET Core learning path.
Other Courses and Authors I Recommend
If you’re relatively new to ASP.NET and/or ASP.NET Core, then a great place to start is with the ASP.NET Core Fundamentals course for beginners, by Scott Allen.
If you want to get a deep understanding of how ASP.NET Core MVC executes requests, ASP.NET Core 3.0: The MVC Request Life Cycle by Alex Wolf is a great place to start.
A critical concept when building secure applications is Authentication and Authorisation in ASP.NET Core, and for that, Roland Guijt has you covered. Roland also has many other great courses to check out.
If you’re working with database in .NET applications, you may very well be using Entity Framework as an ORM (Object Relational Mapper). World-renowned expert, Julie Lerman has plenty of content on that topic, including the latest on Getting Started with Entity Framework 6 and Entity Framework Core: Getting Started.
If you’re a cloud developer using AWS, Daniel Donbavand has three great courses covering topics such as Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS S3 and DynamoDb which are all targeted towards .NET developers using the AWS SDK for .NET.
For Azure developers, my friend Mark Heath has a ton of great content, just check out the 5-star reviews! Most recently he has focused on Azure Serverless Functions and Building Microservices.
I could go on and on, there’s so much to explore during a month-long free trial. I recommend you sign up today and get started with some in-depth learning. I’m a passionate continuous learner, and content from Pluralsight is one source of many which I recommend to developers who want to improve their knowledge and skills.
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