Book excerpt: Get a practical understanding of how to build lightweight ASP.NET Core applications and write cleaner, testable, and secure APIs with .NET 6 and Minimal APIs Key FeaturesExplore clear and detailed guidelines to design and develop APIs for ASP.NET Core appsDiscover expert tips, tricks, and best practices to build performant APIsImplement proven web API development methodologies using .NET 6 features and toolsBook Description The Minimal APIs feature, introduced in .NET 6, is the answer to code complexity and rising dependencies in creating even the simplest of APIs. Minimal APIs facilitate API development using compact code syntax and help you develop web APIs quickly. This practical guide explores Minimal APIs end-to-end and helps you take advantage of its features and benefits for your ASP.NET Core projects. The chapters in this book will help you speed up your development process by writing less code and maintaining fewer files using Minimal APIs. You'll also learn how to enable Swagger for API documentation along with CORS and handle application errors. The book even promotes ideas to structure your code in a better way using the dependency injection library in .NET. Finally, you'll learn about performance and benchmarking improvements for your apps. By the end of this book, you'll be able to fully leverage new features in .NET 6 for API development and explore how Minimal APIs are an evolution over classical web API development in ASP.NET Core. What you will learnAdopt new features in .NET 6 for building lightweight APIsUnderstand how to optimize API development with Minimal APIs in .NET 6Discover best practices for accessing and using data in Minimal APIsUnderstand how to validate incoming data to an API and return error messagesGet familiar with dependency injection and logging for identifying errorsLeverage the translation system in Minimal APIs to provide messages and errors in regional languagesWho this book is for If you are an existing .NET developer who wants to develop lightweight APIs quickly without much complexity, this book is for you. If you are a developer who is just getting started with the ASP.NET Core framework, this book will help you learn web API development using the latest .NET features. The book assumes intermediate-level knowledge of C# programming, Visual Studio, and REST API concepts.