This new version of ASP.NET is quite a revolution in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Before ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET was not open source, and ran only on Windows. To develop ASP.NET applications, most developers used Visual Studio as IDE. It was not mandatory, because we could use Notepad with CSharp or VB compilers (which were always free), but so much easier with VS even with an express edition. At that time, the only way to run .NET applications on Linux and macOS was to use Mono, an open source cross-platform version of the .NET Framework.
The ASP.NET Core version 2.0 is far more flexible. You can develop on any OS (at least Windows, Linux, and macOS), use various tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, or even ...
