NET Core 3.0: SDK, Runtime and Set up for Development

1. Introduction

.NET Core 3 was just released recently, along with C# 8, with poweful features and improvements. As I am planning to write a couple of articles about .NET Core and its interactions with different kinds of software packages, this is a good time to do so. This is likely to be the first of many articles about the .NET Core in my blog.

I will concentrate first on the topic of the .NET Core SDK and Runtime Versioning, and the Set up on a development machine in this article. .NET Core evolution has gradually resulted in many SDK and runtimes and installing the latest SDK and Runtime sometimes is not sufficient in my experience. Without a strong foundation and a good understanding of various things, a little hiccup is likely to throw us into confusion. This article is my attempt to demystify this kind of experience through many trials and errors and hopefully put us in a strong foot to start a .NET Core journey going forward. Potentially there are many things I may have missed along the way, please free to comments and I am happy to rectify after some double-checking.

Working in an agile Team

When I first joined my current company, as a software developer, I worked in a waterfall engineering process environment. I had a team lead which would give some job to do, and for the rest of the time, I could spend a number of days without interaction with other people. Working in those days was soul-sucking, draining my energy and motivation bit by bit. Things improved a little bit when I was moved to a larger team, and the situations were pretty much still the same, but with harder and complex problems to solve and this gave me a bit more motivation to work.

FHIR Path Validation with SpecFlow

I worked on a project related to FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources), and I was temporarily moved to the test automation team to help them with their workload. I learned soon that they wrote a lot of validators code to interrogate and validate different part of FHIR resources. For example there were ObservationValidator, ImmunizationValidator and the list went on.

I was thinking this was not effective as it did not conform DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principles. I did my research and considering different alternative ways to replace the framework such as using JSON path, XPath and lastly FHIR Path. FHIR Path seems to be no brainer solution to choose from as it is written especially for navigating FHIR resources.

The full specification of the FHIR Path can be found here . Here is some snippet from the web page explaining what FHIR Path is.