ASP.NET Core Aims to Keep ASP.NET Competitive

ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform (Linux, Mac, and Windows) open source software Web application framework. It offers a subset of the Windows-only ASP.NET framework’s functionality using a highly revised architecture that improves performance and the development experience. ASP.NET Core is more competitive with the latest popular Web technologies (such as Node.js) than ASP.NET, and it could particularly benefit developers building microservices, which are Web services components of larger applications. It could also promote the usage of Visual Studio and Azure, although neither is required. However, making some existing ASP.NET applications cross-platform may not yet be possible with the latest ASP.NET Core releases.

Renewed Approach

ASP.NET was first released in 2002, having evolved from the original Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side Web application technology (now often called ASP classic) by adopting the managed environment of the Windows-based .NET Framework. ASP.NET has been successful, but it has been challenged by other frameworks, runtimes, and languages, such as PHP, Java, Express, and Node.js, that run on Windows and Linux and can be used with more and lower-cost tools than ASP.NET.