Getting Started With Minimal API In .NET 7

Double-click on the project name in Solution Explorer to open .csproj file in the editor or Right-click on the project and then click on Edit Project File in order to edit the .csproj file. As shown in the following image.

Once clicked on Edit Project File, .csproj file will be opened in Visual Studio as shown below. Where you can see the target Framework net7.0, by default Nullanle and ImplicitUsings are enabled.

Connected Services

It contains details about all the service references added to the project. A new service can be added here, for example, if you want to add access to Cloud Storage of Azure Storage you can add the service here. As shown in the following image.

Dependencies

The Dependencies node contains all the references of the NuGet packages used in the project. Here the Frameworks node contains reference two most important dotnet core runtime and asp.net core runtime libraries. Project contains all the installed server-side NuGet packages, as shown below.

Properties

Properties folder contains a launchSettings.json file, which contains all the information required to lunch the application. Configuration details about what action to perform when the application is executed and contains details like IIS settings, application URLs, authentication, SSL port details, etc.

Controllers

Web API Controller handles incoming HTTP requests and sends response back to the caller.

Web API controller is a class that can be created under the Controllers folder. It can be derived from ControllerBase class.

appsettings.json

This file contains the application settings, for example, configuration details like logging details, database connection details.

Program.cs

It contains Main method.

WeatherForecast.cs

It’s the model class.

Now, build and Press Ctrl+F5 to run without the debugger. Visual Studio displays the following dialog:

Select Yes if you trust the IIS Express SSL certificate.

Again, The following dialog is displayed:

Select Yes if you agree to trust the development certificate.

Output

You can see in the above image that Minimal API comes with a default weather forecast and Swagger Documentation for ASP.NET Core Web API with Controller.

Up to now we have only created and explored the default Minimal API and default project structure.

Conclusion

In this article we explained, how to create a minimal Web API in .NET 7.0 applications and explain default project structure step by step. I hope this article is useful to understand.