[1/1] Become a Full Stack .NET Developer: Course Introduction

I plan to initially use this blog to document my learning experience as I go through a PluralSight course entitled "Become a Full-stack .NET Developer". In total this is an almost 15 hour course split into three major sections and several dozen individual modules. The course is instructed by Mosh Hamedani and is the most watched and highly reviewed course on PluralSight for 2016.

For each module in the course I intend to write a blog post detailing what I have learned in that module as I follow along and code out the solution. I hope that by doing this it will refresh and improve my knowledge from college for developing web applications on the Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET, Entity Framework etc...) in combination with front end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc...) while also acting as a talking point in any programming job interviews I hope to go for in the future.

In an attempt to structure this series of blog posts, I will place two numbers in each post title. The first number corresponding to one of the aforementioned three sections of the course, while the second number corresponds to the module within that section. 

Some of the fundamental web development concepts the course will teach are:

• Building User Interfaces

• Building Back-End API's

• Object Orientated Programming

• Clean Architecture and Automated Testing

• Security and Usability

• Code First Approach

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A visual mockup of "GigHub", the mini social networking app that I will be developing as part of this course.

The main tools I will be using are Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition, ASP.NET MVC 5 and Entity Framework 6. 

As recommended at the outset of the course, I will also be using three plugins for Visual Studio - Resharper, Productivity Power Tools and Web Essentials. Also Visual Studio Online will be used for the initial planning of our app's use cases and as a online repository for version control.

The practical aim of the course is to build a mini social networking app dubbed "GigHub" designed around concert goers. Some of the main use cases of the app will allow musical artists to be able to add their upcoming gigs to the app, while normal users will be able to view all upcoming gigs and follow their favourite artists to be notified when they add a new upcoming gig to the app. These notifications should be reminiscent of the notification bar in Facebook.

To finish off this post I've included the YouTube trailer for the course embedded below. I hope by the end of this course I will be able to confidently call myself a .NET web developer.