Ever since the introduction of ASP.NET MVC and subsequently Web API, there has been some confusion brewing in the .NET Web development community in relation to the versioning practices being followed by the platform developers within the realm of ASP.NET. ASP.NET MVC and Web API spawned their versions different from ASP.NET and continued to release their own in spite of being part of ASP.NET.
Popularity of ASP.NET Forms also took a beating given the ever-increasing demand for ASP.NET MVC and Web API in building enterprise-grade Web applications. This resulted in ASP.NET MVC and Web API garnering more attention from the platform developers and ultimately resulting in them releasing more frequent versions. The release of ASP.NET 5 only added to the confusion with vNext also being a term used interchangeably.
Sometime during the beginning of this year, the ASP.NET platform development team decided to drop this nomenclature and agreed to completely rebrand ASP.NET as ASP.NET Core 1.0. This came riding quickly on the heels of rebranding .NET as .NET Core. Now it is no longer a newer version of an existing Web development framework, that is better and bigger than its predecessor. It is a completely brand new Web platform written from the ground up for .NET Core. It is actually much more lightweight than ASP.NET 4.6.
While the Core 1.0 version is not as complete as 4.6, with the release of RC2?a few weeks back, the framework is really coming close to general availability. There are significant gaps still in what 4.6 offers, and what is available in Core 1.0, but it is a unified platform, nevertheless, with MVC and Web API being part of it and not being branded as separate frameworks. This is very promising indeed!
The biggest change in RC2 is that there is a new .NET CLI, that replaces DNX- the unified .NET library for running applications in Windows, Mac, and Linux. RC2 has also updated the hosting mechanism to a console app, giving developers more flexibility in controlling the way their Core app will run and making the tool chain consistent for both .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core provides for a WebHostBuilder?class that gives you the power to configure your Web application the way you want it, including the ability to optionally host it on IIS. In addition to some groundbreaking changes, RC2 also gives you the ability to host your ASP.NET Core applications in Azure.
A paradigm shift in Web development is coming our way with ASP.NET Core, and at this point we are eagerly awaiting the RTM release!
