2. Getting Started

Question 1

What happens, when you start without debugging?

Answer 1

Visual Studio will compile and start the example application and then open a new browser window to send the application an HTTP request

Question 2

What does the launch.json file contain?

Answer 2

the startup settings

Question 3

What are endpoints and how do they work?

Answer 3

In an ASP.NET Core application, incoming requests are handled by endpoints. The endpoint that produced the response in Figure 2-17 is an action, which is a method that is written in C#. An action is defined in a controller, which is a C# class that is derived from the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Controller class, the built-in controller base class.

Question 4

Understanding routes?

Answer 4

The ASP.NET Core routing system is responsible for selecting the endpoint that will handle an HTTP request. A route is a rule that is used to decide how a request is handled. When the project was created, a default rule was created to get started. You can request any of the following URLs, and they will be dispatched to the Index action defined by the Home controller:

•/
•/Home
•/Home/Index
So, when a browser requests http://yoursite/ or http://yoursite/Home, it gets back the output from HomeController’s Index method. You can try this yourself by changing the URL in the browser. At the moment, it will be http://localhost:5000/, except that the port part may be different if you are using Visual Studio. If you append /Home or /Home/Index to the URL and press Return, you will see the same Hello World result from the application.

Question 5

How does HTML rendering work?

Answer 5

The output from the previous example wasn’t HTML—it was just the string Hello World. To produce an HTML response to a browser request, I need a view, which tells ASP.NET Core how to process the result produced by the Index method into an HTML response that can be sent to the browser.