Programming ASP.NET Core, First edition

Introduction

“We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”

—President John F. Kennedy, Speech to the Irish Parliament, June 1963

Some aspects of the ASP.NET Core story remind me of the beginning of the ASP.NET adventure more than 15 years ago. A very young Scott Guthrie—now a Microsoft VP—presented a new thing called ASP+ to a small audience of web developers in London in the fall of 1999. Those were the days of Active Server Pages, and ASP+ was trying to introduce a new syntax for moving the VBScript code back to the server and express it through a compiled language. ASP+ was a real breakthrough.

At the time of the presentation, there was no public awareness of the .NET thing yet, which would not be publicly disclosed ...