What is Asp.Net Core
Asp.Net Core is completely re-written prior to earlier versions works on .Net framework. Asp.Net was developed with main focus to make it cross-platform! Yes Asp.Net core is now cross platform. It has gained popularity in quick time for modern day web development. One go cloud development with configurations made easy, with self hosting process with IIS and many more features added to Asp.Net core which makes it stand tall!
Cross Platform!
Yes! you read it right, Asp.Net core is now cross platform. The Asp.Net core CLR now has now WPF & winforms. It is built to code once and run on any platform. We can now have the .Net framework installed on Linux, Unix or OSX.
.Net Core CLR has joined the open source community and is on github. Anyone can contribute now on github for the .Net Core. Asp.Net Core applications can run both on .Net earlier frameworks and also on .Net core, which puts a great benefit for the developers. .Net Framework 4.6 is the same .Net we have been using and continue to develop the same way. .Net Core gives a platform to generate cross-platform solutions. But .Net 4.6 is stable and .Net core is under progress.
Merged stack MVC & Web API
Now this seems interesting. What? MVC & Web API merged!! Yes it is, in Asp.Net core we will have the merged stack of MVC and API and moreover Webforms is completely gone! Earlier we were required to add more than one Web project, one for MVC and one for Web API. But in Asp.Net core, we need to have only one project.
Multiple inbuilt tools are being used with .Net Core to build web applications with ease like NPM used for tools support, Client side support using Bower, Grunt & Gulp for building automatically, & as usual Nuget for .Net packages.
.Net Core application with Command Prompt & VS Code
Once we have installed .Net core framework in our system, since it is open source the .Net Framework can be accessed and projects can be maintained through command prompt.
Open command prompt, and hit “dotnet”. It will result the entire information of the .Net framework.
To create a new project using the dotnet templates, using scaffolding in VS IDE. The same scaffolding is also possible in the command prompt. With the command, “dotnet new”. This creates the scaffolding and restores the packages required if not exist.
Then the scaffolding templates:
Here we see multiple templates
Choose one of the templates setting the path where the project needs to be added. Lets create a console application as of now in one of our drives. To add a new console application, the command goes like below:
Here a new project is created, a console application for “Hello World”. Then when you run, you get namespaces missing error and navigating into the directory, you find the bin and obj folders go missing. Thus the error shown below:
Thus, restoring the packages solves the issue.
“dotnet restore”
This resolves and restores the required default packages for the console application.
Then build the project in order to ensure the code is errorless.
“dotnet build”
After build succeeds, then run the project to get the out put.
“dotnet run”
Output goes as below:
The same can be achieved in the terminals of Linux OS & Mac OS, just .net Core framework needs to be installed on the OS, which is why .Net core is developed to make it cross platform.
Upcoming articles we will look into the more details of the dotnet core. Creating Web applications using .net core and the MVC6.
