ASP.NET Core Introduction

ASP.NET Core is a cross platform, high-performance, open-source framework for building modern, cloud based, web application. It's completely new framework that written from ground up. It provides unified solution for mvc & web api. Using this framework, you can deploy your application on Windows, Mac & Linux.

ASP.NET Core ships entirely as NuGet packages. Using NuGet packages allow you to optimize your app to include only necessary dependencies.

History

Asp.Net 5 is renamed as ASP.NET Core at the 1.0 release. ASP.NET Core 1.0 released in June 2016. Currently 3.0 preview launched by microsoft.

Why ASP.NET Core

Open source
Supporting cross platform like Windows, Mac and Linux.
Unified application for both Mvc & Web Api.
Built in depndency injection.
Lightweight, high performance and modular HTTP request pipeline.
Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process.
Integration of modern, client side frameworks development workflows.
Cloud-based supporting application.
Step-by-step app versionning when targeting .NET Core.

Choose .NET Core when:

Deploying in cross platform
Multiple versions per machine
Targeting microservices
Required Docker
High performance & scalable system

Choose .Net Framework when:

Your current project on .Net Fraework
Only targeting Windows platform.
Specific targeting NuGet packages, that not available for .NET Core
You application is simple.

Difference between .Net Core & ASP.NET Core

.NET Core is a framework and ASP.NET Core is made on top of .NET Core for building web application. This is simmilar to .NET framework and Asp.Net

Prerequisites

You can download latest version of .NET Core 3.0 preview from here.