What is ASP.NET Core?

Beginner Updated December 11, 2024

🔍 The Complete Guide to ASP.NET Core & ASP.NET Core MVC

Welcome to a comprehensive, technically in-depth, and crystal-clear guide to understanding ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET Core MVC — two essential technologies in the modern .NET development ecosystem.

Whether you're building microservices, RESTful APIs, or dynamic websites, this tutorial will walk you through both concepts, laying down the foundations, differences, use-cases, and hands-on examples to boost your real-world development skills.

📘 What is ASP.NET Core?

ASP.NET Core is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework for building modern, cloud-based, and internet-connected applications. It’s a redesign of ASP.NET with a modular architecture, built from the ground up to provide higher performance and more flexibility.

Think of ASP.NET Core as the foundation or engine for developing web apps and APIs using the .NET ecosystem.

It supports various application models:

  • Web APIs (RESTful)
  • Razor Pages
  • SignalR (for real-time apps)
  • Blazor (for SPA apps)
  • MVC (Model-View-Controller)