Getting Started with ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio for Mac

Installing .NET 6

.NET 6 is automatically installed when you install Visual Studio for Mac. For more information about versions of .NET supported in Visual Studio for Mac, see Supported versions of .NET.

Open Visual Studio for Mac. On the Start Screen, select New

The New Project dialog is shown. It lets you select a template to create your application.

There are many projects that'll provide you with a prebuilt template to start building your ASP.NET Core Application. They are:

• .NET Core > Empty
• .NET Core > API
• .NET Core > Web Application
• .NET Core > Web Application (Model-View-Controller)
• gRPC Service
• .NET Core > Blazor Server App
• .NET Core > Blazor WebAssembly App
• Razor Class Library
• Angular
• React.js
• React.js and Redux

Select the ASP.NET Core Empty Web Application and select Continue. Give the Project a name and select Continue. These steps create a new ASP.NET Core app. In the Solution window's left pane, expand the second arrow and then select Program.cs. It should look similar to the following image:

The ASP.NET Core Empty template creates a web application with default files like Program.cs that is explained here. It also creates a Dependencies folder, which contains your project's NuGet package dependencies such as ASP.NET Core, the .NET Core framework, and the MSBuild targets that build the project:

Open and inspect the Program.cs file in your project. Notice that several things are happening. The first is that there's no Main method. By default the Empty template is configured to use the minimal Web API type projects introduced in .NET 6.

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
var app = builder.Build();

app.MapGet("/", () => "Hello World!");

app.Run();

The following code creates a WebApplicationBuilder and a WebApplication with pre-configured defaults:

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
var app = builder.Build();

The following code creates an HTTP GET endpoint / that returns Hello World!:

app.MapGet("/", () => "Hello World!");

app.Run(); runs the app.

This simple Hello, World project can run now without any extra code being added. To run the app, you can either select which browser you want to run app in using the dropdown list right of the Play button. Or, you can hit the Play (triangular) button to use your default browser: