Introduction to ASP.NET Core

Introduction to ASP.NET Core

Core Active Server Pages (ASP) was first introduced in 1998 as Microsoft’s flagship development framework for building server-side technologies. It was meant to compete with other web frameworks, like PHP, which was very popular at the time. It was initially developed for creating and running dynamic, interactive web applications. Upon requesting an ASP file, the web server executes any code in the file and returns the result it produces to the browser. Initially only focused on rendering pure websites in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) on the server, ASP (also known as Classic ASP) evolved to become ASP.NET in 2002 as part of the .NET framework—one of the most used frameworks today. The ASP.NET framework is the successor to Classic ASP and offers a vast variety of application models for building web-based applications fit for almost any scenario. To date, ASP.NET includes ASP.NET Web Pages for, like Classic ASP, creating simple pagedriven websites; ASP.NET Web Forms for making dynamic form-driven web applications; ASP.NET MVC for creating more advanced web applications based on the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern; and ASP.NET Web API specifically for building APIs. Fast forward to 2016, when a new variety was born called ASP.NET Core. It combined the best of ASP.NET Web Pages, -MVC, and -Web API application models into one application framework, which majorly contributed to the One ASP.NET movement, meaning one extensible web framework.

 As the .NET framework evolved, it became more mature and stable, which was a good thing as it was among the premiere frameworks of choice. The downside was that .NET and ASP.NET were both tightly coupled to the release cycles of Visual Studio, which were slow. 

The need for quicker releases was urgent and demanded decoupling from Visual Studio, its languages, and its development frameworks. The resulting modularity allows for faster release cycles and quicker feedback loops, enabling technology to adapt at the same pace as business changes

What is ASP.NET Core?

To help you fully understand what ASP.NET Core is, you should first take a step back and wrap your head around the underlining development platform, called .NET Core.
The .NET Core framework is a brand-new, lightweight, and modular platform developed by Microsoft and the community for building cross-platform applications and services. It implements the .NET Standard protocol to target all platforms in order to deliver a unified experience.

Why Use ASP.NET Core?

ASP.NET Core includes a unified use case for building web-based user interfaces and web APIs. Furthermore, it integrates with other modern client-side frameworks, development workflows, and tools. The framework contains a cloud-ready, environment-based configuration system out of the box that supports application settings provided in many different formats, all in one simple model. One of the unique features of ASP.NET Core is the notion of making dependency injection a first-class citizen within the framework. Unlike the HttpHandlers and HttpModules featured in the ASP.NET framework, the new HTTP request pipeline has been designed for more straightforward use, making it much more modular and lightweight.

Inherently, ASP.NET Core can be hosted everywhere (because it is built on top of .NET Core), be it internet information services (IIS), self-hosted in its own process, or even hosted inside Docker. Regarding deployments, all components of ASP.NET Core comprise of multiple NuGet packages, allowing granular features to be autonomously installed.

ASP.NET Core Features

Hosting is a fundamental feature of ASP.NET Core and is at the heart of any server-based application. An application host acts as a container and is responsible for managing the lifetime of the application. The host also contains environment configuration and servers for handling requests. From a REST perspective, hosts and servers satisfy the Client-Server constraint.

The middleware feature aligns beautifully with the Layered System constraint from REST. The overall request/response architecture is primarily driven by middleware, which are components that can intercept requests and perform specific logic before possibly invoking the next component in the pipeline or stopping the request entirely. To have maintainable and extensible code, you need to have loosely coupled 

To have maintainable and extensible code, you need to have loosely coupled components that are easy to test. Using a pattern called dependency injection (DI), one can achieve loose-coupling by automatically resolving code dependencies by “injecting” them when needed. In ASP.NET Core, DI is baked right in and available from the start.

One of the unique features of ASP.NET Core is configuration, which allows for application settings to be read at runtime from many different sources, like files, from the command line, environment variables, in-memory, encrypted secret stores, or your own tailor-made providers, like an INI file provider

ASP.NET Core provides an extensive logging infrastructure that works with many providers to send entries to many destinations. You can control the level of logging as well as the scope of log entries, which groups log data for similar operations.

Setting Up the Development Environment

Getting ASP.NET Core is easy. In fact, there are many ways of installing this framework onto your environment. In this section, we will cover two ways of installing ASP.NET Core.  https://www.visualstudio.com

Download Visual studio from above URL and install it 

With ❤️ Happy Coding