Earlier this year, a friend who is a dev advocate for .NET on AWS reached out to me to see if I had any awareness at all about the support Amazon Web Services has for .NET developers and .NET applications. My answer was a definite no. I’m an Azure fan girl and had never even thought about .NET on AWS. When he started rattling off some of what’s available, APIs, tooling and a dedicated team, I was surprised.

And curious.

So I have spent quite a bit of time sating that curiosity. I’ve written two articles that were published in Code Magazine this summer and recently published a course on Pluralsight. I still love Azure (and all my friends who work on Azure), but I’m glad to have deeper familiarity of other options. This makes me a better developer as well as a better consultant to my clients.

My focus has not been on deep DevOps or comparisons to Azure. I just wanted to see how things work and try it out. And I was definitely impressed.

I did all of the work in Visual Studio on my Windows machine because there is a very feature rich extension called AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. There are also extension for VS Code, JetBrains’ Rider and other IDEs (not just for .NET). The ones for VS Code and Rider are more focused on serverless apps so they don’t have all of the features of the one for Visual Studio.

Since I’ve already created so much content, I’m not going to reiterate it all here but I wanted to be sure you are aware of the articles and the course and…the fact that there is such a thing as .NET on AWS. Whether, like me, you are curious, or like others, you are a .NET developer who has been tasked to learn about using AWS, I hope you find them interesting. Here’s what I’ve created thus far:

Discovering AWS for .NET Developers
Article, May/June 2020 Code Magazine

This is about first foray. Creating an account, installing the toolkit into Visual Studio, creating a SQL Server database (on AWS), pointing a .NET Core 3.1 App with EF Core to use that database, then (using the AWS toolkit), publishing the application to AWS.

Transform Your ASP.NET Core API into AWS Lambda Functions
Article. July/August 2020 Code Magazine

This is the next foray. I took the application from the first article, transformed it into an AWS serverless application (mostly by adding a few files provided by a project template), then publishing it to AWS. In the end, AWS creates a Lambda serverless function in front of the API, which means you get the benefit of the billing that is only based on calls coming through function. That compares to the cost of having the application running and waiting for requests 24/7. 

Fundamentals of Building .NET Applications on AWS
Pluralsight course, 2.5 hours. Published Aug 7, 2020

The course leans on what I learned through the articles but also allowed me to spend more time explaining and teaching additional information. In the course, I walk through creating an account, installing the toolkit, creating the SQL Server database, publishing the .NET Core/EF Core app and publishing the serverless app. There is an additional lesson which is about publishing the application as docker containers, fully managed by AWS via a service called Fargate. There’s a lot more detail than the articles and I’m really walking you through  step by step from start to end for each task.

I hope you’ll find the articles and course helpful and interesting, especially, if like me, you had no idea all of this support for .NET devs exist from AWS. 

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