ASP.NET Core is the new direction that Microsoft is taking their web technologies. It is still in its early stages but is showing a lot of promise. Between versions 1.0 and 1.1, the Kestrel server has shown significant speed improvements. ASP.NET Core is a significant departure from the previous generation of ASP.NET in that it was (and currently is) a community-driven and developed project whose source code can be found on GitHub. ASP.NET Core also has the advantage of being very modular, this means that it can be run on IIS Servers, or the newer, lighter Kestrel Server. Another advantage ASP.NET Core has is that it shares a single set of libraries for creating Web API and Web applications. The most important advantage is that unlike traditional ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core is fully cross-platform.

At the end of this tutorial, we’ll create a full-fledged Notes application and deploy it to Heroku, but for this part, we’ll start with a basic application which would show “Hello World” in the browser.

We would be using the ASP .NET Core yeoman generator to spin up our web application. If you don’t have the ASP .NET Core generator, you can install it via npm. The following dependencies are required:

1. .NET Core SDK which can be gotten from here 

2. Node JS which can be gotten from here

3. Yeoman which can be installed by running

   npm install -g yo
   

4. Bower which can be installed by running

   $ npm install -g bower
   

5. ASP .NET yeoman generator by running

   $ npm install -g generator-aspnet
   

Once you’re all set, run the following command;

$ yo aspnet

You should see the following screen;

Select the “Empty Web Application” option using the up and down arrow keys and accept with the Enter key.

Set your app name, for this tutorial, we’ll use cookieauth.

After that, a set of files would be created in the folder cookieauth

Next change directory to the cookieauth folder using:

$ cd cookieauth

Run the commands

$ dotnet restore

To get all required libraries from Nuget

$ dotnet build

To compile the existing code to an executable

$ dotnet run

This would run the empty app on the default port (5000) and can be accessed via the URL http://localhost:5000

If you visit HTTP://localhost:5000 in your browser, you should see

That would be it, for this. Check out the next tutorial in this series.

Cheers