In my early exploration of Razor Pages I had thought of them as a hi-bred of Web Forms and ASP MVC. And several months later I still think of them that way. And although I am still not completely sold on the idea. I do think they are an interesting and plan to spend more time working with them on my next project. having said that, the question I am still asking myself is “What is different about Razor pages”.
Matthew Jones of the Exception Not Found blog has published a thorough post on this subject, which can be found in this post, “How Does Razor Pages Differ From MVC In ASP.NET Core?“.
Another resource and one that I cannot say enough good things about is this book, “ASP.NET Core 2.0 MVC And Razor Pages For Beginners: How to Build a Website” by Jonas Fagerberg. I thought I had already wrote about it on this blog before but couldn’t find any post mentioning it. So this is the mention and I will include the review that I added to Amazon’s site
I have bought dozens of technical/programming books over the last 10 years covering every topic on the Microsoft stack and this book rates as one of the best. The author has a great ability to teach you how to use the tooling to quickly create decent looking “real world” applications. I have dabbled in ASP.Net core and bought a couple of Core books before this one but wasn’t able to stick with them cover to cover as I have this one. In fact I found it so helpful that I bought a physical copy to go along with the Kindle version I originally bought.
Two things that I should note is that they have done something different with the code formatting in this book then I have never seen in any other Kindle book. The code is in color and is formatted like it would be in the book (although the book version isn’t in color). It almost looks like an image of the code block was pasted into the text. But it is not an image because you can copy and paste into your editor. If you have ever purchased a ASP code book on Kindle you will know what a mess the code formatting usually is. I am hoping that all future programming books do the same thing. What a treat!
The other thing to know is that the author has you use a third party tool to use in one of the tutorials, which between the time this book was finished and now the maker of that tool no longer offers a free version of it. I contacted the vendor and they said my only option was to buy a year subscription to try it out and they would refund my money if I requested it up to 30 days.
There are a few minor code issues but they were easy to debug so no show stoppers there. Based on my experience I think that if you go into this book with prior (even just a little) ASP.Net knowledge you will have no issue learning how to build out a full Core web application with just this book. .
