You probably noticed, when we talked about OWIN, that I mentioned that the sample app was hosted in Kestrel. Kestrel is the name of a platform-independent web server fully written in .NET Core (of course, using the native libraries of your operating system). You need to host your web application somewhere, and .NET Core offers the following options:
- Kestrel: Platform independent, your host of choice if you want to have your code run on any platform.
- WebListener: A Windows-only host, offering significant performance advantages over Kestrel, but also has the disadvantage of needing Windows; starting with ASP.NET Core 2, it is now called HTTP.sys.
- IIS: As in the past, you can continue to host your web app in IIS, on Windows, benefiting from the old pipeline and configuration tools.
A server in this context is merely an implementation of IServer, an interface defined in the Microsoft.AspNetCore...
