An overview of ASP.NET Core

A high-level overview of ASP.NET Core provides following insights:

• ASP.NET Core runs both on Full .NET framework and .NET Core.
• ASP.NET Core applications with full .NET framework can only be developed and deployed on Windows machines.
• When using .NET core, it can be developed and deployed on a platform of choice. The logos of Windows, Linux, and macOS indicate that you can work with ASP.NET Core on those.
• ASP.NET Core, when on a non-Windows machine, uses the .NET Core libraries to run the applications. It's obvious you won't have all the .NET libraries, but most of them are available.
• Developers working on ASP.NET Core can easily switch working on any machine not confined to Visual Studio IDE.
• ASP.NET Core can run with different versions of .NET Core.

ASP.NET Core has many other foundational improvements apart from being cross-platform. The following are the advantages of using ASP.NET Core:

• ASP.NET Core takes a totally modular approach for application development--every component needed to build an application is well factored into NuGet packages. We only need to add the required packages through NuGet to keep the overall application lightweight.
• ASP.NET Core is no longer based on System.Web.dll.
• Visual Studio IDE was used to develop ASP.NET applications on Windows OS box. Now, since we have moved beyond the Windows world, we will require IDE/editors/ Tools required for developing ASP.NET applications on Linux/macOS. Microsoft developed powerful lightweight code editors for almost any type of web applications called as Visual Studio Code.
• ASP.NET Core is such a framework that we don't need Visual Studio IDE/ code to develop applications. We can use code editors like Sublime and Vim also. To work with the C# code in editors, install the OmniSharp plugin.
• ASP.NET Core has powerful, seamless integration with modern web frameworks like Angular, Ember, NodeJS, and Bootstrap.
• Using bower and NPM, we can work with modern web frameworks.
• ASP.NET Core apps are cloud ready with the configuration system--it just seamlessly gets transitioned from on-premises to cloud.
• Built-in dependency injection.
• Can be hosted on IIS, or self-hosted in your own process or on Nginx (It is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy for LINUX environment.).
• New lightweight and modular HTTP request pipeline.
• Unified code base for web UI and web APIs. We will see more on this when we explore the anatomy of an ASP.NET Core application.