19 Best ASP.NET Core (MVC & API) Online Courses

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Simon Mclellan

Writer, developer.

ASP.NET Core is a relatively new technology but has already gained enormous popularity amongst developers world-wide. It is a twin technology with the ASP.NET, which runs only on the full .NET Framework and the Windows platform. ASP.NET Core runs on any platform, and that’s what has attracted so many new developers into the Microsoft development.

Beloved dotnet core
Most Loved Frameworks (source: Stack Overflow).

Although the ASP.NET is still supported by Microsoft, companies that already use the ASP.NET are migrating to the new ASP.NET Core. Not because it’s a shiny new technology, but because it enables developers to be more productive, easier to develop with, is faster, modern, fully modular, can run in the containers, has a lot of useful features built-in.

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In this article, I will gather and put together all the useful ASP.NET Core online courses that I personally have watched to deepen my knowledge with the technology. This is also a list of online courses that have helped my coworkers transition from non-technical roles to developer roles after they watched the C# online courses first. I know that my coworkers were using the Pluralsight team subscription, but I do have my own subscription as I don’t like the fact that the company may be monitoring my profile and see what courses I have been watching.

Anyway, here’s a list of ASP.NET Core online courses that will teach you everything about the ASP.NET Core.

ASP.NET Core Fundamentals course

As the title suggests, this course will give you the big picture of what ASP.NET Core is, what can you do with it and why should you use it. In this course, you will be building a sample application from scratch, so you will get a good understanding of how to use ASP.NET Core. Although you won’t become an expert ASP.NET Core programmer after watching this course, you’ll know how it works and what features are available, and that’s a great start.

Prerequisites

You can be a complete newbie in using the ASP.NET Core, however, you should know how to program at least. As this is a Microsoft technology I would strongly recommend you go through the C# programming courses first. Then take this course as your next step.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll have a good understanding of the ASP.NET Core.
  • You’ll know how to access databases from the ASP.NET Core application.
  • You’ll know what Entity Framework Core is and how to use it to access databases.
  • You’ll know what Razor Pages are.
  • You will understand how to incorporate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build user interfaces.
  • As a cheery on a cake, you’ll be introduced to the middlewares and how they work. Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand this feature if you are a complete beginner. Just know this feature is there and is essential.

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Duration: 5 hours 45 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Asp. Net core fundamentals

Building Web Applications with ASP.NET Core MVC course

Although the SPA (or single-page applications) is the way to go for the majority of companies nowadays, many companies are still running the ASP.NET Core MVC applications. There’s nothing wrong with the MVC type of applications though it’s just that the companies are now choosing more modern ways to develop their applications, for example, ASP.NET Core API + Angular / React.

Prerequisites

This is a fundamentals course around the MVC type of applications, so you don’t need to have any prior experience with MVC. However, you should know how to program with C# programming language.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You will be building a real-world application from scratch using ASP.NET Core MVC.
  • You will be learning the core concepts of the ASP.NET Core MVC: Views, Models, Controllers, Partial Views, View Components, Tag Helpers, Dependency Injection, and more.
  • You’ll know how to connect to the database and query it from the application using Entity Framework Core.
  • You’ll know how to add navigation to the web application.
  • You will also know how to set up authentication using ASP.NET Identity.

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Duration: 4 hours 20 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Building web applications with asp. Net core mvc

Building an API with ASP.NET Core course

Now that you are familiar with the MVC pattern, it’s time to get familiar with the RESTful APIs. In the modern world, APIs are used along with technologies like Angular or React to build modern web applications. Angular or React consumes the API to fetch information from the server and then render it on the web page. APIs can also be consumed to create or update resources on the server. It is also very common to implement the communication between the APIs too.

Prerequisites

This is an introductory course on APIs, so there’s no prior knowledge about APIs required. You will be fine to take this course having just C# programming knowledge.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll know how RESTful APIs are built.
  • You’ll know what the Postman is and how to use it when working with APIs.
  • You’ll get familiar with the HTTP protocol and the Status Codes.
  • You’ll know what GET / POST / PUT / DELETE means and how to use them.
  • How to version APIs.

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Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Building an api with asp. Net core

Dependency Injection in ASP.NET Core course

Dependency injection is a well-known term among developers around the world and is considered to be one of the best practices using it when developing software. You can think of the Dependency Injection as being a code design pattern, and in general, it is not specific to ASP.NET Core. However, this course will teach you about the ASP.NET Core built-in IoC container (IoC stands for Inversion of Control).

Prerequisites

Before you take this course, you should be familiar with ASP.NET Core MVC and/or APIs. Specifically, you should know how to run these applications in your local environment, because this course is teaching you how to plug-in dependencies using the built-in IoC container, and use them in your running application.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You will be introduced to the concept of IoC container and Dependency Injection.
  • You’ll be introduced to the Microsoft Dependency Injection container.
  • You’ll know what the service lifetimes are and how to choose between them.
  • You’ll know how to register simple and complex services, inject, and resolve.
  • You’ll know how to use third-party IoC containers instead of the built-in container.

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Duration: 2 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Dependency injection in asp. Net core

Using Configuration and Options in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core Apps course

As you will be developing your applications, you will see the need for having some sort of configuration that your application’s behavior relies on. Beginner developers tend to have these application settings hard-coded and that’s totally fine while learning how to code. At some point, you will want to step forward and improve on this too. This ASP.NET Core course will teach you how to securely use the configuration feature in your applications.

Prerequisites

You should already be comfortable in creating and running ASP.NET Core based applications, as well as be comfortable with a C# programming language.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll know how to add configuration to your ASP.NET Core applications.
  • You’ll know what are Configuration and Options, and how to use them.
  • You’ll know how to work with different configuration providers to be able to store your configuration settings in the Azure Key Vault for instance.

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Duration: 2 hours 10 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Configuration and options

Effective Logging in ASP.NET Core course

Logging is essential to every application. When we release or even debug our applications, we want to see what’s happening in the application and when.

Imagine a situation when you have your application deployed and consumed by your customers. Now, how do you know that your application is running without any faults/errors? Moreover, if there are some nasty bugs in your application (most likely there are), how would you know what was the user journey on your application that caused one or another error? Maybe some part of your application is not working at all?

Once your application has been deployed and is up and running, without having logging implemented, you’re pretty much blind and unaware of what is happening with your application, and what your customer experience is like. Logging should be implemented in a way to tell you a whole story of a user journey for you as an application developer.

Prerequisites

Before you take this course, make sure you feel comfortable with programming and technologies in general. When watching this course, you may feel like you want to go and implement logging coupled with some third-party software, such as ElasticSearch.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll fully understand logging and how it’s done in ASP.NET Core applications.
  • You’ll know different levels of logging events and how you should choose between them.
  • You’ll fully understand the anatomy of a Log Entry.
  • You’ll know how to consume logs effectively (Serilog, Seq, NLog, ElasticSearch, Azure App Service Diagnostics).

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Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Effective logging in asp. Net core

ASP.NET Core 3.0: The MVC Request Life Cycle course

There was a course focusing on the fundamentals of the ASP.NET Core MVC applications, but with this course, Alex Wolf demystifies how the Http Request travels through the application pipeline. This course must be watched by all ASP.NET Core developers.

Prerequisites

If you follow all the courses in the same order I’ve placed them in this article, you’ll be fine with taking this course. In this course, you will be examining the internal ASP.NET Core bits, so you need to be comfortable with a C# programming language.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll understand the MVC Request lifecycle inside out.
  • You’ll fully understand the MVC Request journey through your application pipeline.
  • You’ll understand the MVC Controller initialization.
  • You’ll understand the model binding system and how action methods handle MVC Requests.
  • You’ll know how to implement your custom middlewares to complement the pipeline with.
  • Finally, you’ll be exploring the View Engine to understand how the Views are rendered.

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Duration: 2 hours 40 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

The mvc request life cycle

Improving .NET Core MVC Apps Using Extension Points course

Usually, we, developers, end up implementing lots of customization to everything to meet complex requirements for an application. It’s no different with the ASP.NET Core MVC applications. Although the ASP.NET Core MVC offers plenty of features out-of-the-box, we often need to customize those features. The MVC was designed in a way that we can customize pretty much any feature. This is what this course focuses on.

Prerequisites

There is no special requirement for you to take this course, however, you should be comfortable with using ASP.NET Core MVC, and, obviously, C#.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll know how to improve Views and Layouts.
  • You’ll know how you can control application flow even more – using Filters.
  • You’ll know how to enhance data binding and validation.
  • You’ll know how to customize application responses.
  • You’ll know how to influence the Action Method selection process.
  • You’ll know how to change the MVC conventions using the App Model.
  • You’ll know how to customize the Middleware Pipeline.

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Duration: 3 hours 40 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Improving. Net core mvc apps using extension points

Authentication and Authorization in ASP.NET Core course

Authentication and Authorization are the two very important aspects that need to be implemented right from the very beginning of the application development. If you were going to implement authentication and authorization yourself, then it’s not going to be easy. There are so many things that need to be considered when writing this kind of functionality yourself, and because this is a critical part of the application, it needs to be done right. There’s no other option. Luckily, ASP.NET Core has built-in functionality that we can use to support authentication and authorization within our ASP.NET Core applications.

Prerequisites

Although it’s not necessary, it would be easier for you if you had some prior experience or knowledge around OpenID Connect, security claims, access tokens, identity providers, and cookies. Don’t worry if you don’t have any knowledge about all of that – after watching this course, you’ll be more than capable to do further studies around those things as this course’s focus is on authentication and authorization implementation instead.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll understand Authentication and Authorization in ASP.NET Core
  • You’ll understand how to work with external identity providers, such as Facebook or Google.
  • You’ll know how to implement authentication and authorization using ASP.NET Core Identity.
  • You’ll know how to implement authentication using external identity providers.
  • You’ll know how to implement authorization.

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Duration: 3 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Authentication and authorization in asp. Net core

Building ASP.NET Core Hosted Services and .NET Core Worker Services course

This is an exciting time for .NET developers. Previously, to have some background tasks running, we had to rely on some third-party tools, like HangfireLinux daemons, and similar things. It’s also a very common situation to have a Windows service implemented to handle some heavy workloads in the background.

Now, to implement the background tasks, we can use the ASP.NET Core Hosted Services and Worker Services. They are relatively new concepts, but personally, this is a long-awaited piece of functionality, and now we have that out-of-the-box.

Prerequisites

The author of the course suggests students bringing general .NET Core knowledge, knowledge around the ASP.NET Core concepts, and knowledge of building ASP.NET Core applications.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll be introduced to the Hosted Services and Service Workers concepts.
  • You’ll know the difference between them and when to use them (and when not to).
  • You’ll know how to implement Hosted Services and Service Workers to the advanced levels.
  • You’ll learn how to build Microservices and consume message queue services on AWS.
  • You’ll also know how to deploy Services Workers using Docker containers.

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Duration: 2 hours 15 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Hosted services and. Net core worker services

Getting Started with ASP.NET Core SignalR course

ASP.NET Core SignalR is an exciting feature to be used for creating applications that need real-time features. The most common example of that would be chat applications, games, whiteboard applications, etc. This is not an in-depth course, digging deep into SignalR-based application implementation, but it rather gives you some really good tips and caveats that will help you when you’ll be implementing SignalR applications.

Prerequisites

C# programming knowledge will be useful.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll understand what real-time web applications are.
  • You’ll know the difference between AJAX / Polling / Long Polling / SSE / WebSockets.
  • You’ll understand how ASP.NET Core SignalR works and how it compares with Azure SignalR Service.
  • You’ll be implementing the ASP.NET Core SignalR application.

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Duration: 1 hour 10 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Getting started with asp. Net core signalr

ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers and View Components course

Tag Helpers and View Components makes the ASP.NET Core MVC application development so much easier and organized. These features are one of those most used features when developing ASP.NET Core MVC applications. In ASP.NET MVC (the full .NET Framework), there was no such concept of the Tag Helper. In ASP.NET Core, with since the Tag Helper has become available, the Razor syntax became much like writing an ordinary HTML markup.

View Components, on the other hand, gives even more cleanliness to the ASP.NET Core MVC applications than they were before. This course will dig deeper into these two concepts.

So, if you are planning to develop your MVC application, make sure to check out this course.

Prerequisites

No special requirements before you can take this course, all you need to do is to make sure you have C# programming knowledge and have completed the MVC fundamentals course first.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll master Tag Helpers.
  • You’ll master View Components.

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Duration: 3 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Tag helpers and view components

ASP.NET Core Health Checks course

I’m sure that every developer wants to make sure that every application or service they wrote is up and running, and is in a healthy condition. Lots of companies have implemented health-checking service on their own. Nothing’s wrong with that, but the chance is that these custom solutions for health checks are highly over-engineered. I’d recommend you give this course some of your time and watch it during your lunch break. Maybe that’s all you need to have these health checks implemented.

Prerequisites

You should have an understanding of the ASP.NET Core concepts.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • This is a relatively new feature, so you will see how it works and how to implement it.

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Duration: 1 hour
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Asp. Net core health checks

Designing RESTful Web APIs course

As you may have noticed, there already was a course covering APIs, however with this course, you’ll be focusing on designing high-quality RESTful APIs using ASP.NET Core. It is not just another API course that overlaps with the previous courses that I have listed in this article. As the author states:

You will examine how creating an API can stand up to the test of time instead of extending your proof of concept into a supported API you can’t get rid of.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with ASP.NET Core in general, as well as the C# programming language.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You will explore API design philosophies.
  • You’ll learn how to correctly use URIs, verbs, message bodies, versioning, and security.
  • You’ll learn how to implement the pagination properly.
  • You’ll learn how to handle errors.
  • You’ll learn how to implement caching with ETags.

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Duration: 2 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Designing restful web apis

Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core 3 course

I’m not sure why Pluralsight has put this course under the “beginner” category as this course goes deep into details that even senior devs rely on these concepts every day when developing RESTful APIs. Although the previous course gives you a great overview of how you can design RESTful APIs properly (and you should), this course steps even further and in greater detail, with even more demos. In this course, you will find something that you have already heard of, however, you’ll also discover new things that you didn’t know about.

Prerequisites

By now, you should have a solid understanding of ASP.NET Core technology, this will suffice to dive deep into this course.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll understand the importance of Status Codes and how to enrich responses.
  • You’ll learn about the Formatters and Content Negotiation.
  • You’ll learn about the benefits of using AutoMapper and how to use it.
  • You’ll learn how to perform filtering and searching.
  • You’ll learn about data validation and reporting validation errors.
  • You’ll learn all about Getting / Creating / Updating / Deleting resources and various HTTP methods to achieve all these operations.

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Duration: 5 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Building a restful api with asp. Net core 3

Implementing Advanced RESTful Concerns with ASP.NET Core 3 course

This is a serious course for serious ASP.NET Core RESTful API devs. Again, I’m not sure why this course was placed under the beginner category in Pluralsight (at least at the time of writing this article). I have taken this course myself quite recently and found some stuff that I didn’t know about, even though I hold over a decade of experience in the .NET field. Probably, it’s just yet another proof that you can’t know everything about everything.

Prerequisites

You should have a good understanding of ASP.NET Core API.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll learn how to implement pagination (in a bit different way, I’m sure you’ll like it).
  • You’ll learn about HATEOAS and how to implement it.
  • You’ll learn the content negotiation in-depth.
  • You’ll learn about resource caching (caching is tricky!).
  • You’ll learn about HTTP Cache for ASP.NET Core APIs.
  • Concurrency bits. Really worth watching.

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Duration: 4 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Implementing advanced restful concerns with asp. Net core 3

Building an Async API with ASP.NET Core course

Async programming isn’t one of those easiest things to learn and fully understand. Same with RESTful APIs. I like the way how this author has approached to teach about how to perform various API operations asynchronously.

Prerequisites

You need to have a good knowledge of both the C# programming language and the ASP.NET Core technology.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll understand the power of Async.
  • You’ll learn how to perform various operations asynchronously (reading and manipulating).
  • You’ll also learn about the common pitfalls.

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Duration: 2 hours 40 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Building an async api with asp. Net core

Documenting an ASP.NET Core API with OpenAPI / Swagger course

Now that you know how to design and implement ASP.NET Core RESTful APIs properly, it’s time to learn about OpenAPI / Swagger. Don’t worry, it’s quite easy to learn, but the benefit that you and your team will get is enormous. OpenAPI / Swagger is something that you’ll use on top of your APIs, or together, I should say. You can ask any developer about Swagger, and you’ll hear only positive things. Make sure you know how to use it too.

Prerequisites

To use Swagger, you’ll need to have some pre-built API.

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  • You’ll learn about OpenAPI and Swagger.
  • You’ll know how to document your APIs.
  • You’ll learn how to deal with different versions.
  • You’ll learn how to protect your API documentation.
  • You’ll learn how to customize the documentation to the advanced levels.

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Duration: 3 hours
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Documenting an asp. Net core api with openapi-swagger

Using OpenAPI / Swagger for Testing and Code Generation in ASP.NET Core course

With this course, you’ll gain complete knowledge of OpenAPI / Swagger, which will be a great addition to your already comprehensive bag of knowledge of the ASP.NET Core technology. If you’ve reached this far watching all of these ASP.NET Core courses, you must complete this one as well. Some of the information will overlap with the previous OpenAPI / Swagger course, but hey, you’ll get something new as well.

Prerequisites

You are a master of the ASP.NET Core technology, no further experience required from you!

Key takeaways from this course

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  • You’ll be reminded of what OpenAPI / Swagger is!
  • You’ll learn how to generate client-side code from OpenAPI specification.
  • You’ll learn how to use OpenAPI to test an API.

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Duration: 1 hour 20 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Using openapi-swagger for testing

Building GraphQL APIs with ASP.NET Core course

Ok, believe or not, I haven’t watched this course myself, but it’s definitely on my list for the near future. I am not an expert in GraphQL APIs, and I don’t even know what this is! I went through the table of contents of this course, and to me — it looks interesting to learn more.

Prerequisites

I have only watched the course introduced just for the sake of completing this course description in this article. The author says that you’ll need to know ASP.NET Core, as well as RESTful APIs. No other choice but to trust what is advised by the professional instructor.

Key takeaways from this course

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  • This course promised to teach about the GraphQL APIs.
  • Knowledge of creating GraphQL APIs.
  • Knowledge of consuming GraphQL APIs.
  • Mutating data with GraphQL. What?
  • Knowledge of working with subscriptions.

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Duration: 1 hour 20 minutes
Available here: link to the Pluralsight course

Building graphql apis with asp. Net core

Conclusions

First of all, thanks for reading this massive list of powerful ASP.NET Core online courses. ASP.NET Core is an exciting technology to work with, and learning ASP.NET Core alone can be a great career. Additionally (obviously), you’d need to learn C# and SQL database programming. If you are going to learn ASP.NET Core, this is your ultimate list of online courses to fully master this technology.

If you liked this article and think it’s useful, please feel free to share it on your website or with your coworkers/colleagues. I’d be grateful for that!