ASP.NET Core in Action, Third Edition

4 Handling requests with the middleware pipeline

This chapter covers

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

In chapter 3 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 on one small subsection: the middleware pipeline.

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

The middleware pipeline is one of the most important ...