Microsoft ASP.NET Core is part of a history of Microsoft technologies used to build web applications and services that have evolved over the years:
- Active Server Pages (ASP) was released in 1996, and was Microsoft's first attempt at a platform for dynamic server-side execution of web application code. ASP files are written in the VBScript language.
- ASP.NET Web Forms was released in 2002 with the .NET Framework, and is designed to enable nonweb developers, such as those familiar with Visual Basic, to quickly create web applications by dragging and dropping visual components and writing event-driven code in Visual Basic or C#. Web Forms can only be hosted on Windows, but it is still used today in products such as Microsoft SharePoint. It should be avoided for new web projects in favor of ASP.NET Core.
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was released in 2006, and enables developers to build SOAP and REST services. SOAP is powerful but complex, so it should be avoided...