A brief history of the Microsoft Web API

A few years ago in 2007, .NET web applications went through an evolution with the introduction of ASP.NET MVC. Since then, .NET has provided native support for the Model-View-Controller pattern that was common in other languages.

Five years later, in 2012, RESTful APIs were the new trend on the internet and .NET responded to this with a new approach for developing APIs, called ASP.NET Web API. It was a significant improvement over Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) because it was easier to develop services for the web. Later, in ASP.NET Core these frameworks were unified under the name ASP.NET Core MVC: one single framework with which to develop web applications and APIs.

In ASP.NET Core MVC applications, the controller is responsible for accepting inputs, orchestrating operations, and at the end, returning a response. A developer can extend the entire pipeline with filters, binding, validation, and much more. It’s a fully featured framework for building modern web applications.

But in the real world, there are also scenarios and use cases where you don’t need all the features of the MVC framework or you have to factor in a constraint on performance. ASP.NET Core implements a lot of middleware that you can remove from or add to your applications at will, but there are a lot of common features that you would need to implement by yourself in this scenario.

At last, ASP.NET Core 6.0 has filled these gaps with minimal APIs.

Now that we have covered a brief history of minimal APIs, we will start creating a new minimal API project in the next section.