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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Just this week I wanted to spin up a minimalist ASP.NET page for "tyre-kicking" of new infra builds. You know, something that just coughs up a single page with some basic info, such as the regional options, time zone, current time, and the latency to the SQL Server. This checks that the infra guys did their job and that the AD accounts and firewall ports are in place.

I wanted to write 1 page with just some dynamic labels, that's it. Nothing fancy. No MVC. No dependency injection. No JavaScript frameworks. No CSS. Just one ASPX or CSHTML page.

Visual Studio 2019 no longer ships with a web project template that does that. Every single project type coughs up megabytes of crap and a bunch of scaffolding.

After hours of clicking through every project type, I resorted to another hour of googling to discover that the "legacy" empty templates are still there, but only available as a hidden install option!

It's madness.

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It is strange that you couldn't find the empty web template. Every version of ASP.NET Core has come with one. Empty is the first option in the "Create a new ASP.NET Core web application" dialog in VS2019, and "dotnet new web" creates an empty website via the command line.

What did you need to do to create an empty website?

Disclaimer: I work on ASP.NET Core

The most minimalist ASP.NET Core template I could find made it too difficult to create a "page" with some code-behind.

I could create a CSHTML page and inline expressions worked, but I couldn't convince it to execute anything from a matching cs class.

I did google this, and it's not like I hadn't written Razor syntax pages before, but that was a few years ago and my memory was fuzzy.

What I found was that Razor pages are now part of any number of very similar sounding but wildly different frameworks, and code samples for one do literally nothing in the other. It's not even self-evident which framework I'm "in" for any given project. Half of it seems to be just convention, the other half is explicit configuration, and it's all version specific.

I tried to go back to classic ASP.NET, thinking that that's actually a better fit for the type of legacy web app server testing that I need to do. That's where I found the new project templates that pull in more code by default into an "empty" project than I've written in the past half a decade.

"self-evident which framework I'm "in" for any given project"

Has that changed? It's in the project properties in Visual Studio where I think it's been for as long as I can remember?

NB I've been using .Net for about 15 years and quite happily using .Net Core 3.1

> The most minimalist ASP.NET Core template I could find made it too difficult to create a "page" with some code-behind.

The minimalist projects don't do "code-behind" at all.

>No dependency injection. No JavaScript frameworks. >Visual Studio 2019 no longer ships with a web project template that does that. Every single project type coughs up megabytes of crap and a bunch of scaffolding.

Yeah, the way depency injection and multiple JS frameworks are shoved down your throat in .NET Core is sooo annoying.

> Yeah, the way depency injection and multiple JS frameworks are shoved down your throat in .NET Core is sooo annoying

I've been using dotnet core for years and precisely zero times I have had any JS framework shoved down my throat.

Not sure how you miss the Empty project template: https://i2.wp.com/anthonygiretti.com/wp-content/uploads/2020...

With the new request handling pipeline you hardly need a template for a single page diagnostic.

https://anthonygiretti.com/2020/06/29/nano-services-with-asp...

I had VS 2019 open and tried this - creating an empty project is the first entry on the list of templates - all it contains is a minimal Program.cs and Startup.cs - nothing else.

When run all it does is return "Hello World!" in plain text - it doesn't even use HTML.

GP is not talking about an empty app project.

It's a minimalist web app that responds to HTTP requests without using MVC, not a console app?

dotnet new web ?

dotnet new empty ?

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