Behind the scenes with the ASP.NET Web API

Let's talk about some of the internal workings of ASP.NET Web API and how a request is received and a corresponding response generated.

Anatomy of the API of ASP.NET Web API

Before we understand the request and response lifecycle within ASP.NET Web API, it is important to comprehend some of the principal types and their usage within the pipeline.

The core assemblies for ASP.NET Web API can be installed using the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi NuGet package, which is distributed under the MS license, this will install all the required dependencies to develop an ASP.NET Web API service.

Note

NuGet is the package manager for the Microsoft development platform, including .NET. The NuGet client tools provide the ability to produce and consume packages. NuGet is installed as part of the Visual Studio 2013 release. To know more about NuGet, visit https://www.nuget.org/.

To install the runtime packages via the NuGet Package Manager Console in Visual Studio use...