Creating an Empty Project

We will start by creating an empty ASP.NET Core project and explore how to enable it to serve simple web pages.

A step-by-step guide for creating an empty project

We will create an ASP.NET Core project showing a list of suppliers from the Northwind database. The dotnet tool has many project templates that do a lot of work for us, but it can be difficult to know which works best for a given situation, so we will start with the empty website project template and then add features step by step so that we can understand all the pieces:

Step 1: Use your preferred code editor to open the PracticalApps solution or workspace and then add a new project, as defined in the following list:

• Project template: ASP.NET Core Empty [C#]/web

• Project file and folder: Northwind.Web

• Workspace or solution file and folder: PracticalApps

• For Visual Studio 2022, leave all other options as their defaults. For example, “Configure for HTTPS” was selected, “Enable Docker” cleared, and “Do not use top-level statements” cleared.

• For Visual Studio Code and the dotnet new web command, the defaults are the options we want. We will not do this, but if we want to change from top-level statements to the old Program class style, specify the switch --use-program-main. In Visual Studio Code, select Northwind.Web as the active OmniSharp project.

Step 2: Build the Northwind.Web project.

Step 3: Open the Northwind.Web.csproj file and note that the project is like a class library except that the SDK is Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web, as shown in the following markup: