Chapter 1: Understanding the ASP.NET 5 React Template

React was Facebook's answer to helping more people work on the Facebook code base and deliver features quicker. React worked so well for Facebook that they eventually open sourced it (https://github.com/facebook/react). Today, React is a mature library for building component-based frontends (client-side code that runs in the browser); it is extremely popular and has a massive community and ecosystem. At the time of writing, React is downloaded over 8.8 million times per week, which is 2 million more than the same time a year ago. 

ASP.NET Core was first released in 2016 and is now a mature open source and cross-platform web application framework. It's an excellent choice for building backends (application code that runs on the server) that interact with databases such as SQL Server. It also works well in cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.

In this first chapter, we'll start by learning about the single-page application (SPA) architecture. Then, we'll create an ASP.NET Core and React app using the standard template in Visual Studio. We will use this to review and understand the critical parts of a React and ASP.NET Core app. Then, we'll learn where the entry points of both the ASP.NET Core and React apps are and how they integrate with each other. We'll also learn how Visual Studio runs both the frontend and backend together in development mode, as well as how it packages them up, ready for production. By the end of this chapter, we'll have gained fundamental knowledge so that we can start building an app that uses both of these awesome technologies, something we'll gradually build upon throughout this book.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• SPA architecture
• Understanding the ASP.NET Core backend
• Understanding the React frontend

Let's get started!