Once ASP.NET 5 RC1 is successfully installed, open the Visual Studio, create a new project and select the ASP.NET 5 Web Application as shown in the following screenshot:
A new project will be created and the structure will be like following:
Whenever you add a file or folder in your file system (inside the ASP.NET 5 project folder), the changes will be automatically reflected in your application.
You might have noticed a couple of references in the preceding project: DNX 4.5.1 and DNX Core 5.0. DNX 4.5.1 provides functionalities of full-blown .NET whereas DNX Core 5.0 supports only the core functionalities, which would be used if you are deploying the application across cross-platforms such as Apple OS X, Linux. The development and deployment of an ASP.NET Core application on a Linux machine will be explained in a later chapter.
Usually, in an ASP.NET web application, we would have the assemblies as references and the list of references in a C# project file. But in an ASP.NET 5 application, we have a JSON file by name Project.json, which will contain all the necessary configurations with all its .NET dependencies in the form of NuGet packages. This makes dependency management easier. NuGet is a package manager, provided by Microsoft, which makes package installation and uninstallation easier. Prior to NuGet, all dependencies had to be installed manually. The dependencies section identifies the list of dependent packages available for the application. The frameworks section informs us about frameworks, supported by the application. The scripts section identifies the script to be executed during the build process of the application. Include and exclude properties can be used in any section to include or exclude any item.
This folder contains all of your controller files. Controllers are responsible for handling requests, communicating models, and generating the views.
Views are files that contain your frontend components and are presented to the end users of the application. This folder contains all of your Razor View files.
Any database-related migrations will be available in this folder. Database migrations are the C# files which contain the history of any database changes done through an Entity Framework (an ORM framework). This will be explained in detail in a later chapter.
This folder acts as a root folder and it is the ideal container to place all of your static files such as CSS and JavaScript files. All the files which are placed in wwwroot folder can be directly accessed from the path without going through the controller.