ASP.NET Core 2.0 features

The new Microsoft.AspNet.Core.All package contains all ASP.NET Core 2.0 features in a single library. It includes authentication, MVC, Razor, monitoring, Kestrel support and many others. They are explained in more detail later in the book.

Note that if you want to selectively add packages one by one, you can still reference them manually instead of using the single packages that contain it all but then you will miss several advantages as you will see here.

The runtime store is an important new component shipped with ASP.NET Core 2.0. It contains compiled packages, which were compiled using the native machine language and it is key for improved performance. All applications using the Microsoft.AspNet.Core.All package benefit from it, because they do not need to be deployed with all the dependent packages anymore. Everything is already there, so their deployment size will be reduced and their execution time will be optimized.

ASP.NET Core 2.0 allows you to create well-factored and testable web applications that follow the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. We have dedicated a full chapter to this topic later in the book.

Furthermore, you can build HTTP services with full support for content negotiation using custom and built-in formatters such as JSON or XML as well as RESTful services.

ASP.NET Core 2.0 fully supports Razor which contains an efficient language for creating your views and Tag Helpers enable server-side code to participate in creating and rendering HTML elements in Razor files.

Model binding automatically maps data from HTTP requests to action method parameters and model validation automatically performs client and server side validation.

In terms of client-side development, ASP.NET Core 2.0 is designed to integrate seamlessly with a variety of client-side frameworks including AngularJS, KnockoutJS, and Bootstrap.

Additionally, it provides the following fundamental improvements:

• ASP.NET MVC and Web API have been combined into a single framework
• Modern client-side frameworks and development workflows
• Environment-based configuration system ready for cloud hosting
• Built-in dependency injection functionalities
• New light-weight and modular HTTP request pipeline
• Host the same application in IIS, self-host, Docker, Cloud and even in your own processes
• Hosts multiple versions of an application or a component side-by-side
• Ships entirely as NuGet packages
• New tooling that simplifies modern web development
• Simplified csproj file, making it easier to work with development environments other than Visual Studio (on Linux and macOS, for example)
• The Program.cs class has been extended to fully automate the integration of Kestrel, the setting of the ContentRootPath, loading the configuration files, initializing the logging middleware, and other steps by only calling a single method
• The Startup.cs has been simplified by moving logging and configuration into the WebHost builder initialization