Exploring an ASP.NET Core MVC website

Let's walk through the parts that make up a modern ASP.NET Core MVC website.

Understanding ASP.NET Core MVC initialization

Appropriately enough, we will start by exploring the MVC website's default initialization and configuration:

1. Open the Program.cs file and note that it uses the top-level program feature (so there is a hidden Program class with a Main method). This file can be considered to be divided into four important sections from top to bottom.

   .NET 5 and earlier ASP.NET Core project templates used a Startup class to separate these parts into separate methods but with .NET 6, Microsoft encourages putting everything in a single Program.cs file.

2. The first section imports some namespaces, as shown in the following code:

   using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity; // IdentityUser
   using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore; // UseSqlServer, UseSqlite
   using Northwind.Mvc.Data; // ApplicationDbContext...