Apps and Services with .NET 7
by Mark J. Price
A wide, shallow tour of the .NET 7 stack — useful as a map, not a manual.
- Status
- Read · December 2022
- Bought
- December 29, 2022
- For
- .NET developers surveying the modern stack · Engineers picking between Blazor, gRPC, and GraphQL · Anyone who already finished Price's fundamentals book
Where it earned its place
The one-paragraph verdict
Price does what he’s good at: marching you through a wide stack — Blazor, .NET MAUI, gRPC, GraphQL, EF Core, background services — with runnable projects at every stop. The hands-on, code-first format is genuinely the draw, and the chapters are well organized. But the same breadth is the weakness: most topics get a working example and then the book moves on, so you come away knowing that gRPC exists and roughly how to wire it, not how it behaves under load. It also ages fast — pinned to .NET 7, it was already a version behind real work within a year. Treat it as a guided survey, not a reference.
Who should read it
.NET developers who want a current mental model of the platform’s moving parts, and anyone weighing Blazor vs. a JS frontend or gRPC vs. GraphQL for a service boundary. Skip it if you already work across this stack daily — you’ll find it thin — or if you haven’t done the fundamentals yet, because it assumes them.
Where it earned its place
The Blazor and gRPC chapters were what nudged me toward server-rendered Blazor for an internal dashboard, which became the Blazor real-time NATS updates write-up — pushing live changes into the UI over a message bus instead of polling. The book got me to the starting line; the interesting parts were everything it didn’t cover.
Skip it if…
You need depth on any single technology here, or you’re allergic to books welded to a specific framework version. This is a tour, and tours don’t go deep.
[Apps and Services with .NET 7 on Goodreads]