This post is part of my 12 Days of .NET series. This is a (not terribly ambitious) series of posts on .NET topics that came up while I was working on a recent C# Web API project.
For the .NET project that I’ve been working on recently, I’ve had to play a bit of “catch-up,” since I haven’t been doing too much .NET/C# development recently. My part of the project was to create a middleware API (for lack of a better term) that would provide a simplified internal interface to a more complicated external REST API. I decided to make my API a REST API also, since that’s pretty much the standard at this point. I’d done a lot of work with SOAP APIs in the past. And I’d created a REST API in .NET at least once before, using WCF. Back then, I probably started out by reading something like this article from 2008.
The way to do this stuff now is Web API. The most up-to-date way would be to do this in .NET Core. I couldn’t do that, for reasons that are kind of complicated and not worth going into. (Actually, at some point, I figured out that I probably could do it with .NET Core, but by that point I was too far along to go back.)
I used a few resources to get started. I watched a couple of video courses on Pluralsight: Jon Flanders’ Intro to ASP.NET Web API and Shawn Wildermuth’s Implementing an API in ASP.NET Web API. I also read the book ASP.NET MVC 4 In Action. This was somewhat out of date (last revised in 2012), but was still useful.
So let’s call that my day one post: I started a Web API project, using VS 2017, and the standard .NET Framework.