ASP.NET Core in Action, Second Edition

3 Handling requests with the middleware pipeline

This chapter covers

• What middleware is
• Serving static files using middleware
• Adding functionality using middleware
• Combining middleware to form a pipeline
• Handling exceptions and errors with middleware

In the previous chapter, you had a whistle-stop tour of a complete ASP.NET Core application to see how the components come together to create a web application. In this chapter, we’ll focus in on one small subsection: the middleware pipeline.

In ASP.NET Core, middleware are C# classes or functions that handle an HTTP request or response. They are chained together, with the output of one middleware acting as the input to the next middleware, to form a pipeline.

The middleware pipeline is one of ...