ASP.NET Reference

Esposito, Dino. Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 4. Microsoft Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7356-4338-3. See microsoftpressstore.com. The most complete single treatment of the mature Web Forms stack (runtime and IIS, configuration, handlers/modules/routing, page life cycle, server controls, input forms and validation, data binding and ListView, custom controls, MVP and layering, HttpContext, state management, caching, security, AJAX/partial rendering, jQuery). Ch. 13-15 also supply the MVP-versus-MVC contrast used by the MVC sub-section. Consulted reference, not the primary or main source for any single page — where it and Microsoft Learn disagree, Microsoft Learn is authoritative.

Evjen, Bill; Hanselman, Scott; Muhammad, Farhan; Sivakumar, S. Srinivasa; Rader, Devin. Professional ASP.NET 2.0. Wrox / Wiley, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7645-7610-2. See wiley.com. Server controls and client-side scripts, validation, master pages, themes and skins, data binding and ADO.NET, site navigation, personalization, membership and role management, portal frameworks and Web Parts, state management, caching, HttpHandler/module writing, configuration, administration, packaging and deployment. Predates .NET Framework 4.8.1; consulted reference only.

Schackow, Stefan. Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management. Wrox / Wiley, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7645-9698-8. See wiley.com. The request security pipeline, trust levels, configuration-system security, Forms authentication, session state, the provider model, Membership, SqlMembershipProvider, ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, Role Manager, SqlRoleProvider, AuthorizationStoreRoleProvider. The only deep source for ASP.NET Web Forms Security.

Vogel, Peter. Professional Web Parts and Custom Controls with ASP.NET 2.0. Wrox / Wiley, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7645-7860-1. See wiley.com. User controls, custom and composite controls, templated and data-bound controls, ViewState in controls, Web Parts and inter-part communication. The only deep source for User and Custom Controls.

Freeman, Adam. Pro ASP.NET MVC 5 Platform. Apress, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4302-6541-2 (print), 978-1-4302-6542-9 (electronic). Publisher page: apress.com; code bundle: Apress/pro-asp.net-mvc-5-platform. 411 pp, 15 chapters in three parts. The first local book documenting the .NET Framework platform an MVC 5 application actually runs on, and the primary book source for a large part of both legacy sub-sections: the ASP.NET application and request life cycles and context objects; modules (IHttpModule) and handlers (IHttpHandler); disrupting the request life cycle; device-capability detection; logging and tracing; configuration; application and session state; data and content caching (OutputCache); and ASP.NET Identity across three chapters (setup and administration, authentication and role-based authorization, custom user properties and claims). Feeds The MVC Pattern and Request Life Cycle, Authentication, Identity, and OWIN, Caching and Performance, Testing and Diagnostics, and — because Web Forms and MVC 5 share exactly this System.Web platform — HTTP Pipeline, Handlers, and Configuration and State Management and Caching.
Caveat: this is Pro ASP.NET MVC 5 Platform, the companion volume, not Pro ASP.NET MVC 5. It deliberately does not cover the MVC framework itself — no chapters on controllers, action results, Razor syntax, views/layouts/partials, HTML helpers, model binding and validation, MVC filters, areas, bundling, MVC routing or Web API 2. That framework half of the ASP.NET MVC (Razor) sub-section is sourced from Microsoft Learn only. If a book covering it is wanted, the direct match is the companion volume itself — Freeman, Pro ASP.NET MVC 5, Apress, 5th ed., 2013, ISBN 978-1-4302-6529-0 (Apress/pro-asp.net-mvc-5) — with Galloway, Wilson, Allen and Matson’s Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 (Wrox) as the alternative.

Lock, Andrew. ASP.NET Core in Action, 3rd ed. Manning, 2023. ISBN 9781633438620. See manning.com. The most systematic treatment of the middleware pipeline, minimal APIs, routing, DI, configuration/options, Razor Pages and MVC, the filter pipeline (Ch. 21-22, the primary source for Filters and the MVC Pipeline), Identity and authorization, logging, publishing and HTTPS. Targets .NET 7; consulted reference, predates .NET 10.

Engström, Jimmy. Web Development with Blazor, 4th ed. Packt, 2026. ISBN 978-1-80611-289-0. See packtpub.com. The closest match to this section’s .NET 10 / C# 14 anchor, and the spine of the nine-page Blazor cluster: render modes, Aspire, components and lifecycle, forms and validation, state management, JS interop, authentication, tracing and metrics, bUnit testing, deployment, WebAssembly AOT/trimming/lazy loading/PWA, MAUI Hybrid, and moving from or combining with an existing site (incl. Web Forms).

Tanure, Albert S. ASP.NET Core 9.0 Essentials: Explore the .NET Core web stack, including Razor Pages, Blazor, and MVC, to build cloud-ready apps. Packt, 2025. ISBN 978-1-83546-906-4. See packtpub.com. A broad ASP.NET Core 9 reference. Ch. 2 ("Building Dynamic UIs with Razor Pages, MVC, and Blazor") is the single best source for the server-render-versus-client-render framing that Razor Pages, MVC Controllers and Views and Blazor Overview and Render Modes need. Also used for controller-based Web APIs with binding, validation and Swagger (Web API Controllers, OpenAPI and API Versioning); SignalR servers/clients, streaming and hosting (SignalR); EF Core and Dapper (Data Access with EF Core); Identity architecture, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, secret management, HTTPS and CORS (Authentication and ASP.NET Core Identity, Security Hardening); the middleware pipeline in unusual depth — custom and factory-based middleware, extension-method registration, global error handling, request logging and rate limiting (Request Pipeline and Middleware); IConfiguration, configuration providers incl. writing a custom one, the Options pattern and Azure App Configuration (Configuration and the Options Pattern); caching strategies, Redis and resilience (Performance and Caching, HTTP Client and Resilience); publishing, Docker and CI/CD with GitHub Actions (Deployment); and twelve-factor/CNCF/ event-driven/microservices cloud-native material (.NET Aspire and Cloud-Native Development, Architecture and Patterns).

Marcotte, Carl-Hugo. Architecting ASP.NET Core Applications, 3rd ed. Packt, 2024. ISBN 978-1-80512-338-5. See the publisher’s book page and the code bundle at PacktPublishing/Architecting-ASP.NET-Core-Applications-3E. SOLID, design patterns, layering and Clean Architecture, automated testing; the source for Architecture and Patterns. Predates .NET 10; consulted reference only.

Avedon, Luke; Cabrera, Garry. ASP.NET Core 9 Web API Cookbook. Packt, 2025. ISBN 978-1-83588-034-0. Data access, validation (incl. FluentValidation), Identity/JWT/cookie auth, custom middleware and health checks, Serilog/Seq logging, SignalR, unit and integration testing, GraphQL, Azure/YARP/Aspire deployment, caching (ResponseCache, output caching, IDistributedCache, HybridCache), gRPC and Dapr.

Malavasi, Alexandre. Modern Full-Stack Web Development with ASP.NET Core. Packt, 2025. ISBN 978-1-78913-278-6. ASP.NET Core 9 with Blazor plus Angular/React/Vue integration; the only source for the JavaScript-framework interop material and the cross-links to this site’s Angular/React/Vue references.

Price, Mark J. Tools and Skills for .NET 10, 2nd ed. Packt, 2026. ISBN 978-1-83588-250-4. Debugging and memory troubleshooting, logging/tracing/metrics and OpenTelemetry, documenting APIs and services; used for Error Handling, Logging, and Observability and Testing.

Price, Mark J. C# 13 and .NET 9 — Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals, 9th ed. Packt, 2024. ISBN 978-1-83588-122-4. The C#/.NET language and BCL baseline the examples assume.

Herceg, Tomáš. Modernizing .NET Web Applications. Apress, 2024. ISBN 979-8-8688-0616-2. See apress.com. The primary book source for the three migrating-… pages: framework equivalents old to new, migration strategy and estimation, migrating ASMX/WCF/Web API/SignalR, ADO.NET/LINQ to SQL/EF6 to EF Core, Membership/Universal Providers/ASP.NET Identity to ASP.NET Core Identity, in-place migration (DotVVM) and side-by-side migration (Blazor Server, shared session and auth state), and (Ch. 9) the ASP.NET MVC/Web Pages migration path. Used by Migrating to Modern ASP.NET and Migrating to ASP.NET Core.