front matter
ASP.NET Core 5.0 was released in 2020, more than four years after the release of ASP.NET Core 1.0. But ASP.NET also has a long history prior to ASP.NET Core. That history provided the basis and impetus for the development of ASP.NET Core.
Microsoft released the first version of ASP.NET in 2002 as part of the original .NET Framework 1.0. Since then, it’s been through multiple iterations, with each version bringing added features and extensibility. However, each iteration has been built on top of the .NET Framework, and so comes preinstalled in all versions of Windows.
This brings mixed blessings—on the one hand, the ASP.NET 4.x framework today is a reliable, battle-tested platform for building modern applications on Windows. On the other hand, it is also limited by this reliance—changes to the underlying .NET Framework are far-reaching and so consequently slow to roll out, and it fundamentally excludes the many developers building and deploying to Linux or macOS.
When I first began looking into ASP.NET Core, I was one of those developers. A Windows user at heart, I was issued a Mac by my employer and so was stuck working in a virtual machine all day. ASP.NET Core promised to change all that, allowing me to develop natively on both my Windows machine and my Mac.