Seeing the popularity of open source frameworks, Microsoft also doesn’t want to be behind in the race. In this way, it brought a new well established framework to build web apps called ASP.NET Core.

The ASP.NET Core has been restructured by Microsoft from scratch to be modern, fast, flexible, and platform independent. ASP.NET Core is the framework that can be used for web development with .NET. If you have any prior experience with MVC or Web API over the last few years, you will notice some familiar features but not purely same.

A Brief History of ASP.NET

To develop web applications, ASP.NET has been used from many years. Till now, the framework went through some steady evolutionary changes and finally gave us its most recent descendant ASP.NET Core 1.0.

• 1.ASP.NET Core 1.0 is not a renewal of ASP.NET 4.6.
  
• It is a whole new framework, an along-side project which works side by side with everything else we know.
  
• 2.It is an actual re-design of the current ASP.NET 4.6 framework, but a lot more modular and much smaller.
  
• 3.People think that many things remain the same, but this is not entirely true. ASP.NET Core 1.0 is a big fundamental overhaul to the ASP.NET landscape.

What is ASP.NET CORE?

ASP.NET Core is a cloud-optimized and open source web framework for developing modern web applications that can be developed and run on various platforms such as Windows, Linux and the Mac. It already includes the MVC framework, which combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework.

• 1.ASP.NET Core built apps can run on both .NET Core and on the full .NET Framework.
  
• 2.It is architected to provide an optimized framework for developing apps that are to be run on-premises or deployed to the cloud.
  
• 3.It encompasses of modular components with minimal overhead, so you retain flexibility while constructing your projects.
  
• 4.You can build and run your ASP.NET Core apps cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Also Read: All about Ionic Framework

Advantages of using ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core have the following advantages:

• 1.ASP.NET Core has a number of architectural changes that result in a much leaner and modular framework.
• 2.ASP.NET Core is no longer based on System.Web.dll. It is based on a set of granular and well-tailored NuGet packages.
• 3.This allows you to optimize your app to include just the NuGet packages you need.
• 4.The benefits of a smaller app surface area include higher security, improved performance, reduced servicing and less costs.

With ASP.NET Core, you can get the following improvements −

• Build and run cross-platform ASP.NET apps on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Built on .NET Core, which supports true side-by-side app versioning.
• New tooling that simplifies modern web development.
• Single aligned web stack for Web UI and Web APIs.
• Cloud-ready environment-based configuration.
• Built-in support for dependency injection.
• Tag Helpers which makes Razor markup more natural with HTML.
• Ability to host on IIS or self-host in your own process. 

ASP.NET Core is a significant redesign of ASP.NET

To use ASP.NET Core in your application, the following must be installed in your system−

·         Microsoft Visual Studio 2015

·         Microsoft .NET Core 1.0.0 - VS 2015 Tooling Preview 2

Microsoft provides a free version of Visual Studio which also contains the SQL Server.

It can be downloaded from: www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/downloadvisual-studio-vs.aspx and

Microsoft .NET Core 1.0.0 - VS 2015 Tooling Preview 2 can be downloaded from: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=817245

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