Frontend: MVC & Razor Pages
Server-rendered .NET. Still very common in enterprise codebases — and Blazor's Static SSR mode reuses much of this mental model. Tight section, focused on what's actually distinctive about server-rendered work.
Topics (canonical order)
-
MVC vs Razor Pages, when to choose each, conventions, rendering pipeline
-
Controllers + Razor Pages, when to choose which, conventions
-
Server-side composition primitives
-
Tag helpers for forms, antiforgery tokens, CSRF defense, file uploads
-
Hypermedia-driven interactivity via HTML attribs, returning partials from MVC/Razor, when HTMX beats SPA
Why this order
MVC and Razor Pages are server-rendered frontend concerns, not server-internal pipeline concerns — so they live here, alongside Blazor and React. The supporting ASP.NET Core internals (model binding, filters, routing) stay in ASP.NET Core.
Cross-references
- Pipeline internals used by MVC live in Model Binding & Validation and Filters & Action Pipeline.
- Antiforgery references Antiforgery & CORS.