Solution overview

The first thing that catches the eye is that, as we've already mentioned, the layout of a standard ASP.NET Core solution is quite different from what it used to be in ASP.NET 4 and earlier versions. However, provided that we already have some ASP.NET MVC experience, we should be able to distinguish the ASP.NET back-end part from the Angular front-end part, and also figure out how these two aspects can interact.

The ASP.NET back-end stack is contained in the following folders:

• The Dependencies virtual folder, which basically replaces the old References folder and contains all the internal, external, and third-party references required to build and run our project. All the references to the NuGet packages that we'll add to our project will also be put there.
• The /Controllers/ folder, which has been shipped with any MVC-based ASP.NET application since the preceding release of the MVC framework.
• The /Pages/ folder, which contains a single Razor Page—Error.cshtml—to handle runtime and/or server errors (more on that later on).
• The root-level files—Program.cs, Startup.cs, and appsettings.json—which will determine our web application's configuration, including the modules and middlewares, compilation settings, and publishing rules; we'll address them all in a while.

As for the Angular front-end, it comprises the following folders:

• The /wwwroot/ folder, which will contain the compiled, ready-to-publish contents of our application: HTML, JS, and CSS files, along with fonts, images, and everything else we want our users to have access to in terms of static files.
• The /ClientApp/ root folder, which hosts the Angular (and package manager) configuration files, as well as a couple of important sub-folders of which we're about to give an overview.
• The /ClientApp/src/ folder, which contains the Angular app source code files. If we look at them, we can see that they all have a .ts extension, which means we'll be using the TypeScript programming language (we'll say more about this in a bit).
• The /ClientApp/e2e/ folder, containing some sample end-to-end (E2E) tests built with the Protractor testing framework.

Let's quickly review the most important parts of this structure.