API Development with Swagger in .NET Core

As a software developer, one of the critical components of building an API is its documentation. A well-documented API can help developers understand how to interact with it and can ultimately lead to faster development times and more successful integrations.

One popular tool for documenting APIs is Swagger. Swagger is an open-source framework that allows developers to describe, document, and visualize RESTful APIs. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows developers to quickly understand how to interact with an API.

In this blog post, we’ll go through a step-by-step process of implementing Swagger in a .NET Core API. We’ll use a fun business problem to make things interesting, and we’ll provide multiple types of charts to help illustrate our examples.

Business Problem: Let’s say you’re developing an API for a fictional restaurant that allows customers to place and track their orders. Your API needs to be well-documented so that other developers can quickly understand how to use it. We’ll use this problem to demonstrate how to use Swagger in a .NET Core API.

Step 1: Set Up Your .NET Core API Project

The first step is to set up a new .NET Core API project. We’ll assume that you already have .NET Core SDK installed on your machine. If not, you can download it from the official website.

To set up a new .NET Core API project, open the command prompt or terminal and run the following command:

dotnet new webapi -n RestaurantAPI

This will create a new .NET Core API project named RestaurantAPI.

Step 2: Install Swagger Packages

The next step is to install the Swagger packages that we’ll use to document our API. We’ll use the Swashbuckle.AspNetCore package, which is the most popular package for integrating Swagger into a .NET Core API.

To install the Swashbuckle.AspNetCore package, open the command prompt or terminal and run the following command:

dotnet add package Swashbuckle.AspNetCore

This will add the Swashbuckle.AspNetCore package to our project.

Step 3: Configure Swagger in Your .NET Core API

The next step is to configure Swagger in our .NET Core API. We’ll do this by adding a few…