Building Microservices with ASP.NET Core

Chapter 1. ASP.NET Core Primer

.NET Core is not just yet another .NET version. It represents a complete overhaul of everything we may have learned as .NET developers. This is a brand new, “1.0” product that is finally going to bring .NET development into the open source community as a fully cross-platform development stack.

This chapter will break down the essential components of ASP.NET Core and .NET Core. In classic Microsoft fashion, there are a dozen new terms and labels to learn, and those have changed multiple times between the betas and release candidates, so the internet is awash with confusing, misleading, or downright incorrect information.

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a better idea of what ASP.NET Core is and how it fits into the new cross-platform framework architecture. You will also have set your workstation up with all of the prerequisites so that you’ll be ready to dive into the rest of the book.

Distilling the Core

I’d love  to be able to jump straight to the canonical and mandatory “hello world” application using .NET Core. However, Core (I will use “.NET Core” and “Core” interchangeably throughout the book) represents such an enormous shift in architecture, design, and tooling that we need to take a minute to at least cover some of the terminology that has changed from previous versions of .NET.

Even if you’ve never used .NET before and Core is your first exposure, you’ll find this terminology everywhere you search, so knowing what it all means is ...