What is ASP.NET Core?

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET is a popular web-development framework for building web apps on the .NET platform.

ASP.NET Core is the open-source version of ASP.NET, that runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. ASP.NET Core was first released in 2016 and is a re-design of earlier Windows-only versions of ASP.NET.

Get started with ASP.NET Core

Performance

Performance is a key focus of ASP.NET Core. It's faster than other popular web frameworks in the independent TechEmpower benchmarks.

Modern & innovative

ASP.NET Core is designed to allow runtime components, APIs, compilers, and languages evolve quickly, while still providing a stable and supported platform to keep apps running.

Multiple versions of ASP.NET Core can exist side by side on the same server. Meaning one app can adopt the latest version, while other apps keep running on the version they were tested on.

ASP.NET Core provides various support lifecycle options to meet the needs of your app. You can choose a long-term support release or run with the latest release if you commit to upgrade more often. See our support policy for more details.

Open-source

Like the rest of .NET, ASP.NET is open source on GitHub. .NET has over 100,000 contributions and 3,700 companies have already contributed.

Learn more about .NET and open-source

Windows, Linux, macOS, and Docker

ASP.NET apps can be developed and run on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Docker.

The Visual Studio family of products has tools for building .NET apps on any operating system. There are also command-line tools and extensions for many popular editors.

Learn about tools for .NET

Flexible deployment

The ASP.NET Core runtime that your app runs on can be deployed as part of your app or installed centrally on your web server. ASP.NET Core is also perfectly suited for Docker containers.

Learn about deployment options

Supported

You can build your own version of ASP.NET from source code, but most production apps need a supported version of the platform.

Microsoft ships official releases of .NET that are built and tested on Microsoft-maintained servers in Azure and supported just like any Microsoft product. See the .NET and .NET Core support policy for details.

Red Hat supports .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat builds .NET from source and makes it available in the .NET Download page. Red Hat and Microsoft collaborate to ensure that .NET works well on RHEL.