ASP .NET Core Startup

In the previous article we built a very basic web application that for every request had the same response - Hello, Universe with the server current time and date. Any non-trivial application is going to need a mechanism to handle different types of requests and map them to specific services and middleware and configure services. This is accomplished through the Startup class, which is also the entry point for any incoming HTTP request.

The anatomy of the Startup class

The Startup class needs to have two methods:

• Configure - this method will respond to each incoming HTTP request. In the following example, we will use it to have the same functionality as in our previous example - returning a message with the current server time.

However, most real-world applications require more functionality than this. More complex sets of pipeline configuration can be encapsulated in middleware and added using extension methods on IApplicationBuilder.

Your Configure method must accept an IApplicationBuilder parameter. Additional services, like IHostingEnvironment and ILoggerFactory may also be specified, in which case these services will be injected by the server if they are available.

• ConfigureServices - this optional method is used for configuring services used by the application and is called before the Configure method.

This is the place where we will start discussing dependency injection, which will be covered in a separate topic.

Building the Hello, World web application with Startup

We are going to build the same application that responds with Hello, World and the current time, this time with a Startup class.

First of all, if this is a new application (created using dotnet new), you should add the dependency to the web server Kestrel in project.json, which should look like this:

{
    "version": "1.0.0-*",
    "buildOptions": {
        "debugType": "portable",
        "emitEntryPoint": true
    },
    "dependencies": {},
    "frameworks": {
        "netcoreapp1.0": {
            "dependencies": {
                "Microsoft.NETCore.App": {
                    "type": "platform",
                    "version": "1.0.0"
                },
                "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel": "1.0.0"
            },
            "imports": "dnxcore50"
        }
    }
}

Then, add a new file called Startup.cs and add the following code:

using System;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http;

public class Startup
{
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
    {
        app.Run(context =>
        {
            var response = String.Format("Hello, Universe! It is {0}", DateTime.Now);
            return context.Response.WriteAsync(response);
        });
    }
}

As you can see, the code in Configure is the same as the code in Main from the previous example.

Then, in the Main method we simply indicate that we have a Startup class we want to use.

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;

namespace ConsoleApplication
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var host = new WebHostBuilder()
                .UseKestrel()
                .UseStartup<Startup>()
                .Build();

                host.Run();
        }
    }
}

Now if we run the application (from the command line or from VS Code) and navigate to http://localhost:5000, we see the expected output.

From now on, we will use the Startup class when building web applications with ASP .NET Core and we will add middleware and services in it.