Packaging a traditional ASP.NET web app as a Docker image

Microsoft has made the Windows Server Core base image available on Docker Hub, and that's a version of Windows Server 2016 which has much of the functionality of the full server edition but without the UI. As base images go, it's very large - 5 GB compressed on Docker Hub, compared to 380 MB for Nano Server, and 2 MB for the tiny Alpine Linux image. But it means you can Dockerize pretty much any existing Windows app, and that's a great way to start migrating your systems to Docker.

Remember NerdDinner? It was an open source ASP.NET MVC showcase app, originally written by Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie - among others at Microsoft. You can still get the code at CodePlex, but there hasn't been a change committed since 2013, so it's an ideal candidate for proving that old ASP.NET apps can be migrated to Docker, and that can be the first step in modernizing them.

Writing a Dockerfile for NerdDinner

I'll follow the multi-stage build approach...