A brief history of ASP.NET

ASP.NET History

Microsoft ASP.NET Core is part of a history of Microsoft technologies used to build websites and web services that have evolved over the years:

• ASP - 1996

• ASP.NET Web Forms - 2002

• WCF - 2006

• ASP.NET MVC - 2009

• ASP.NET Web API - 2012

• ASP.NET Core - 2016

Classic ASP.NET versus modern ASP.NET Core

• ASP.NET was built on classic .NET Framework

• It was tightly coupled to Microsoft’s Windows-only web server named Internet Information

• Services (IIS)

• Over the years, this assembly has accumulated a lot of features, many of which are not

• Suitable for modern cross-platform development

• ASP.NET Core is a major redesign of ASP.NET

• It removes the dependency on classic windows only .NET framework

• It is composed of modular lightweight packages, just like the rest of modern .NET

• An ASP.NET Core application is cross-platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux)

• It uses new in-process hosting model.

• This gives a 400% performance improvement!

ASP.NET Core history

Version	Year
ASP.NET 1.0	2016
ASP.NET 2.0	2017
ASP.NET 3.0	2019
ASP.NET 5.0	2020
ASP.NET 6.0	2021
ASP.NET 7.0	2022