Hello and welcome to the exciting world of ASP.NET Core! In this lesson, we'll explore what ASP.NET Core is, its unique capabilities, its common use-cases, and how to set up your development environment. ASP.NET Core is a widely-used, highly-scalable framework employed by companies such as Microsoft, Stack Overflow, and Alibaba. Mastering ASP.NET Core will undoubtedly enhance your skill set and make you more competitive in today's job market.

To benefit from this course, you should be familiar with C# or a similar object-oriented language. Basic familiarity with web concepts such as HTML and JavaScript will also be beneficial. Let's dive in!

ASP.NET Core is an open-source, cross-platform framework for building modern web applications. It is a redesign of the original ASP.NET framework with several important improvements. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, providing high performance, flexibility, and robust integration with the .NET ecosystem.

ASP.NET Core provides a robust and flexible framework for building a wide variety of applications, utilizing several different paradigms:

• Minimal APIs: Simple HTTP APIs, ideal for mobile applications or browser-based single-page applications.
• Web APIs: Structured HTTP APIs with advanced features, offering more capabilities than minimal APIs.
• gRPC APIs: Efficient binary APIs for server-to-server communication using the gRPC protocol.
• Razor Pages: Server-rendered page-based applications.
• MVC Controllers: Server-rendered applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
• Blazor WebAssembly: Single-page applications running in the browser using WebAssembly.
• Blazor Server: State-driven server-rendered applications, interacting with the client over WebSockets.

In this course path, we'll concentrate on building applications using the Minimal APIs paradigm. Moreover, we will cover foundational concepts of ASP.NET Core such as middleware, routing, and error handling to ensure you gain a solid understanding of the framework's core principles.

• Cross-Platform: Operates on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• High Performance: Optimized for speed and reliability.
• Modular Framework: Choose and include only the necessary components.
• Unified Development Model: Combining MVC and Web API, easing the development process.
• Middleware Pipeline: Flexible and configurable request processing.
• Dependency Injection: Built-in support for dependency injection design pattern.
• Configuration & Environment Management: Simplified handling of various configurations.

Exploring things locally can often enhance learning, so if you wish to set up your development environment for ASP.NET Core, here's how you can do it:

• Visual Studio (Windows only): Download and install from Visual Studio Download and choose the ASP.NET and web development workload.
• Visual Studio Code (cross-platform): Download and install from Visual Studio Code Download. Additionally, install the C# extension for .NET development from the Extensions view.

Alternatively, you can use the .NET CLI (Command Line Interface) to create applications from various templates using commands like dotnet new.

However, keep in mind that the CodeSignal platform has already pre-configured the environment for ASP.NET Core development. So, you can just jump in and start coding!

In this lesson, you have learned about the basics of ASP.NET Core, its use cases, key features, and how to set up the development environment. We have prepared a special task for you to get familiar with the CodeSignal IDE and the environment setup. You’ll be creating your first ASP.NET Core application, so let's dive into the hands-on practice next!