Pro ASP.NET Web API: HTTP Web Services in ASP.NET

Pro ASP.NET Web API shows you how to build flexible, extensible web services that run seamlessly on a range of operating systems and devices, from desktops to tablets to smart phones—even the ones we don’t know today.

ASP.NET Web API is a new framework designed to simplify web service architecture. So if you're tired of interoperability issues between inflexible web services and clients tied to specific platforms or programming languages, or if you've ever struggled with WCF, this book is for you.

To start with, you'll get up to speed on Web API's modern HTTP programming model, REST and your hosting options. You'll then dive into building a real application over a series of three chapters, so you can get an immediate feel for how this technology works in practice. The second half of the book features dedicated chapters on topics like routing, controllers, validation and tracing, and the authors close with discussions on performance, hosting and an all-important look at unit testing to help you prepare your application for the real world.

ASP.NET Web API makes HTTP a first-class citizen of .NET. With Pro ASP.NET Web API, you can build HTTP-based web services for your company or business, expose your data to the world across different formats and devices and gain the best possible global reach for your application.

What you’ll learn

• The basics of HTTP web services
• How to build HTTP-based web services on the .NET platform
• In-depth knowledge of ASP.NET Web API and its processing architecture
• How to Unit Test an ASP.NET Web API application
• Asynchronous programming with ASP.NET Web API
• Consuming HTTP-based web services across several different clients

Who this book is for

Whether you’ve previously worked with WCF or are an ASP.NET developer diving into web services for the first time, Pro ASP.NET Web API will show you a clean, modern approach to building HTTP web services.

About the Authors

Tugberk Ugurlu is a Web Developer and a Microsoft MVP who specializes in software for the tourism industry, where he has worked for the past 10 years. He works mostly with ASP.NET and its different frameworks such as ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET SignalR. After studying travel management at college, he was dragged into programming and has been passionate about ASP.NET and its siblings ever since. Although he gets paid for building software applications for tourism services and products, he is also a very involved member of the community and likes to share his knowledge with others through his blog and webcasts, by authoring books, and giving talks on various topics.

Alexander Zeitler is a self-employed Web Developer who has spent 17 years working mainly for the tooling and machining industry as well as plant manufacturing, where he works mainly with ASP.NET MVC and now ASP.NET Web API on the server side and HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript on the client side. He has been rewarded repeatedly with the Microsoft MVP award in ASP.NET for his engagement with the German .NET community and he maintains a blog which he has kept since 2003.

After years of study and five years of practising, Ali Kheyrollahi left Medicine for his love of programming. Thirteen years later, he is a solutions architect for a blue chip company, yet at heart he is the same kid in the toy shop enjoying coding and discovering new shiny technologies.Ali loves HTTP, API design and business-modelling DDD-style. In his spare time he is a blogger and open source author and contributor, working on a few popular projects such as CacheCow - an HTTP caching solution for ASP.NET Web API. He also has a passion for computer vision and has published a few papers on the subject in scientific journals, including Machine Vision and Applications.