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6 |
Introduction |
Why do we need another web |
framework? |
There are a lot of great web frameworks to choose from already: |
Node/Express, Spring, Ruby on Rails, Django, Laravel, and many more. |
What advantages does ASP.NET Core have? |
Speed. ASP.NET Core is fast. Because .NET code is compiled, it |
executes much faster than code in interpreted languages like |
JavaScript or Ruby. ASP.NET Core is also optimized for |
multithreading and asynchronous tasks. It's common to see a 5-10x |
speed improvement over code written in Node.js. |
Ecosystem. ASP.NET Core may be new, but .NET has been around |
for a long time. There are thousands of packages available on NuGet |
(the .NET package manager; think npm, Ruby gems, or Maven). |
There are already packages available for JSON deserialization, |
database connectors, PDF generation, or almost anything else you |
can think of. |
Security. The team at Microsoft takes security seriously, and |
ASP.NET Core is built to be secure from the ground up. It handles |
things like sanitizing input data and preventing cross-site request |
forgery (CSRF) attacks, so you don't have to. You also get the |
benefit of static typing with the .NET compiler, which is like having a |
very paranoid linter turned on at all times. This makes it harder to do |
something you didn't intend with a variable or chunk of data. |
.NET Core and .NET Standard |
Throughout this book, you'll be learning about ASP.NET Core (the web |
framework). I'll occasionally mention the .NET runtime, the supporting |
library that runs .NET code. If this already sounds like Greek to you, just |
7 |
Introduction |
skip to the next chapter! |
You may also hear about .NET Core and .NET Standard. The naming gets |
confusing, so here's a simple explanation: |
.NET Standard is a platform-agnostic interface that defines features and |
APIs. It's important to note that .NET Standard doesn't represent any |
actual code or functionality, just the API definition. There are different |
"versions" or levels of .NET Standard that reflect how many APIs are |
available (or how wide the API surface area is). For example, .NET |
Standard 2.0 has more APIs available than .NET Standard 1.5, which has |
more APIs than .NET Standard 1.0. |
.NET Core is the .NET runtime that can be installed on Windows, Mac, or |
Linux. It implements the APIs defined in the .NET Standard interface with |
the appropriate platform-specific code on each operating system. This is |
what you'll install on your own machine to build and run ASP.NET Core |
applications. |
And just for good measure, .NET Framework is a different |
implementation of .NET Standard that is Windows-only. This was the |
only .NET runtime until .NET Core came along and brought .NET to Mac |
and Linux. ASP.NET Core can also run on Windows-only .NET |
Framework, but I won't touch on this too much. |