Create your ASP.NET Core application with ASP.NET core 2

History of ASP.NET Core :

First version of ASP.NET core(1.0) released in June 2016 in Visual Studio 2015. ASP.NET core applications can be developed and run on WINDOWS, MAC & LINUX. It was initially called as ASP.NET 5 but later Microsoft named it as ASP.NET Core at the ASP.NET Core 1.0 release. 

ASP.NET Core and .net core are not the same, .net core is the runtime that helps for running applications build on it and ASP.NET core is framework used for creating web applications. ASP.NET core applications can be developed using .net core framework or .net Framework. ASP.NET core framework is now combination of MVC and WEB API features into single MVC framework.

Introduction to ASP.NET Core 2.0 :

ASP.NET Core 2.0 released in August 2017 with Visual Studio 2017. ASP.NET Core 2.0 runs on both .net Framework 4.6.1 and .net core 2.0 framework. 

Features of ASP.NET core 2.0 :

1. Cross Platform

2. Performance improvement than ASP.NET Core 1.0

3. Asynchronous  

4. Improved support for dotnet cli : ASP.NET Core applications can be created via dotnet cli command.

5. It now references single meta package “Microsoft.AspNetCore.All” which includes all .net core packages.

6. Introduced Razor Pages.

Creating your ASP.NET Core application :

In this example I am using ASP.NET core 2.0.

In your Visual studio 2015 or later follow the following steps to create your first ASP.NET Core application :

1. Open the Visual studio 2015 or later

2. Click on File=>New=>Project

Select Web Application (Model-View-Controller) for creating ASP.NET core application.

This is how the project structure of ASP.NET core 2.0 application looks like :

After running the project, you can see the following output on your browser :