Chapter 1. Getting started with ASP.NET Core
Figure 1.1. The Stack Overflow website (http://stackoverflow.com) is built using ASP.NET and is almost entirely dynamic content.
Figure 1.2. The relationship between ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET, .NET Core, and .NET Framework. ASP.NET Core runs on both .NET Framework and .NET Core, so it can run cross-platform. Conversely, ASP.NET runs on .NET Framework only, so is tied to the Windows OS.
Figure 1.3. The ASP.NET Core application model. The .NET Core platform provides a base console application model for running command-line apps. Adding a web server library converts this into an ASP.NET Core web app. Additional features, such as configuration and logging, are added by way of additional libraries.
Figure 1.4. The ASP.NET Community Blogs website (https://weblogs.asp.net) is built using the Orchard CMS. Orchard 2 is available as a beta version for ASP.NET Core development.
Figure 1.5. ASP.NET Core can act as the server-side application for a variety of different clients: it can serve HTML pages for traditional web applications, it can act as a REST API for client-side SPA applications, or it can act as an ad-hoc RPC service for client applications.