Advanced Topics

When to start this

Take the advanced course after you have:

Completed the capstone project
Worked comfortably through all 8 basic weeks
A goal of building production-ready, enterprise-grade APIs
An interest in preparing for mid-level developer roles

Advanced Week 1: Code Organization

Move beyond everything in Program.cs. Learn patterns that make larger codebases maintainable.

Topics:

Organizing endpoints into separate files with extension methods
Repository pattern for data access
Service layer separation
DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) and mapping with AutoMapper
Clean architecture principles

Resources:

Advanced Week 2: Advanced Authentication & Authorization

Go beyond “logged in or not” and add fine-grained access control.

Topics:

Role-based authorization (Admin, User roles)
Policy-based authorization
Claims and custom authorization requirements
Refresh tokens and token rotation
ASP.NET Core Identity

Resources:

Advanced Week 3: Advanced Validation & Error Handling

Replace Data Annotations with a more powerful validation approach and standardize error responses.

Topics:

FluentValidation for complex validation rules
Custom validation attributes
Global exception handling middleware
Problem Details standard (RFC 7807)
Consistent error response format

Resources:

Advanced Week 4: Complex Database Scenarios

Go beyond simple one-to-many relationships and learn how to optimize database access.

Topics:

Many-to-many relationships
Database indexing for performance
Raw SQL queries when EF Core is not sufficient
Soft deletes and audit trails (CreatedAt, UpdatedAt, DeletedAt)
Concurrency handling

Resources:

Advanced Week 5: Advanced Testing

Add unit tests with mocking and use real PostgreSQL containers in tests.

Topics:

Unit testing with Moq for mocking dependencies
Testcontainers — spin up a real PostgreSQL instance per test run
Test organization and naming conventions
Code coverage measurement

Resources:

Advanced Week 6: Production-Ready Features

Add the features that real production APIs need.

Topics:

Structured logging with Serilog (console and file sinks)
Health check endpoints
API versioning
Rate limiting and throttling
CORS advanced configuration
Background jobs with Hangfire

Resources:

Advanced Week 7: Performance & Scalability

Make your API fast and able to handle load.

Topics:

In-memory caching and distributed caching with Redis
Query performance optimization
Cursor-based pagination for large datasets
Async best practices and avoiding common pitfalls
Response compression

Resources:

Advanced Week 8: DevOps, Deployment & Observability

Deploy to the cloud, automate your build and release process, and instrument your API with full observability using OpenTelemetry.

DevOps & deployment

Topics:

Docker multi-stage builds for smaller images
CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions
Environment configuration strategies
Secrets management
Cloud deployment (Azure App Service or similar)

Resources:

OpenTelemetry

By this point in the course, students have used built-in ILogger (basic course) and Serilog (Advanced Week 6). OpenTelemetry is the next step — a vendor-neutral, industry-standard framework that unifies the three pillars of observability into a single approach.

The three pillars:

Pillar	What it answers	Example
Logs	What happened?	“User 42 failed to login at 14:03”
Traces	How did it flow, and how long did each step take?	Request → endpoint → EF Core query → response, with ms timing
Metrics	How is the system behaving over time?	Request rate, error rate, p99 latency

Topics:

What OpenTelemetry is and why it matters (vendor-neutral observability)
Instrumentation: adding traces to your Minimal API and EF Core queries automatically
Collecting metrics: request count, latency histograms, error rates
Connecting Serilog logs to OpenTelemetry so all three pillars flow through one pipeline
Running Jaeger (tracing backend) locally in Docker to visualize traces
Running Prometheus and Grafana locally in Docker to visualize metrics
Shipping telemetry to a cloud backend (Azure Monitor / Application Insights)

Local setup with Docker Compose:

Students extend their existing docker-compose skills by adding observability backends as additional services — a natural continuation of the Docker work from the basic course.

docker-compose.yml services:
  api          (your .NET API)
  postgres     (database)
  jaeger       (trace visualization)
  prometheus   (metrics collection)
  grafana      (metrics dashboards)

Learning progression:

Stage	Tool	What it answers
Basic Week 8	`ILogger`	Is my app running?
Advanced Week 6	Serilog	What exactly happened and when?
Advanced Week 8	OpenTelemetry	How is my whole system performing?

Resources:

Additional topics to explore

Architecture patterns:

API design:

Security:

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