1.0: Overview

Overview

ASP.NET Core, released June 2016, is Microsoft's ground-up rewrite of ASP.NET, with a focus on modernizing the framework and separating it from a strictly Windows environment. You can develop ASP.NET Core applications on Linux and Mac as well. ASP.NET Core uses a built in dependency injection container (we'll talk more about this later) that previous versions lacked. Another significant change over MVC 5 is the elimination of HttpHandler and HttpModules in favor of middleware - giving more control of processing HTTP requests to the developer.

ASP.NET Core 2.0 was released in August 2017 and the first version Microsoft argues is production ready.

Note: ASP.NET Core 2.1 is due out the second quarter of 2018, but there shouldn't be many breaking changes from this tutorial.

Pros

• Lighter than the full .NET Framework

• Faster performance

• No longer a separation of MVC and Web API controllers - both inherit from same Controller class

• Microsoft.AspNetCore.All and the Runtime Store - less usings and reduces versioning problems

• Cross-platform

• Command-line interface

Cons

• Younger than MVC 5 - there are still kinks to be worked out.

• Less library support.

• Fewer jobs - most .NET shops have not made the switch yet.