What should a beginner developer learn in C#?

Junes and IT trainees are interested in what libraries, frameworks and C# tools to learn in order to quickly and easily find a job in development.

We interviewed middle and senior level specialists who gave their comments.

We asked:

1. Which C# libraries, tools, frameworks are already outdated?
2. What C# libraries should you know in 2024?
3. What C# frameworks do you need to know in 2024?
4. What C# tools do you need to know in 2024?

Here’s what they said.

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***Yulia Rumyantseva

Head of Web Development Department, Alfa-Leasing Group

Visual Studio is gradually becoming obsolete and is being replaced by a new lightweight version – VS Code. .Net framework and .Net Core are no longer relevant and are becoming a thing of the past. They are being replaced by new versions of the .Net 8 frameworks and are already preparing for the release of .Net 9. The Quartz library for creating schedulers has also become obsolete.

The top popular libraries on nuget.org remain AutoMapper, Newtonsoft.Json, Serilog, FluentValidation, and Hangfire is also gaining popularity.

The latest current framework for C# at the moment is .Net 8. Entity Framework is a framework for working with databases.

In addition to the IDE, developers use version control tools (for example Git), a task management system (Jira), and many JetBrains products also come in handy.

Dmitry Ivashchenko

Programmer, computer game developer

Certain C# libraries and frameworks are no longer relevant. Examples of legacy technologies are Web Forms for web development and Silverlight for creating Internet applications. ADO.NET Entity Framework was widely used in the past, but now there are more modern and user-friendly tools such as Entity Framework Core. Other legacy libraries and tools include NUnit 2, WCF, and Windows Forms.

For a successful career in C# development in 2024, you should master the following key libraries:

1. ASP.NET Core – for developing high-performance web applications.
2. Entity Framework Core is a powerful ORM framework for working with databases.
3. Serilog or NLog – for advanced application logging.
4. AutoMapper – to simplify mapping between objects.
5. MediatR – to implement the Mediator pattern and simplify application architecture.

In 2024, the following frameworks will be at the forefront of C# development:

1. .NET 6/7 is the latest version of the .NET platform, providing cross-platform support and high performance.
2. Blazor – for creating interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript.
3. MAUI is a new approach from Microsoft for creating cross-platform mobile and desktop applications.
4. Orleans is a framework for creating distributed, highly scalable applications.
5. IdentityServer is a framework for implementing authentication and authorization.

To effectively develop in C# in 2024, you need to master the following tools:

1. Visual Studio 2022/2023 is the latest version of the IDE from Microsoft, offering numerous improvements for C# developers. Visual Studio Code is a popular code editor with extensive extension support for C# development.
2. Docker – for containerization and simplified application deployment.
3. Azure DevOps – for automating CI/CD processes and project management.
4. Rider from JetBrains is an alternative IDE for C# development that offers many advanced features for working with your code.

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We remind you that you can ask your question to the experts, and we will collect answers to it if it turns out to be interesting. Questions that have already been asked can be found in the list of issues in the section.

If you want to join the ranks of experts and send an answer from your company or yourself, then write to experts@tproger.ru, we will tell you how to do this.