Q&A

Building Real-World Web Apps with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages

• By David Ramel
• 02/16/2026

ASP.NET Core Razor Pages has become a go-to framework for developers building robust, maintainable, and high-performance web applications -- particularly those that are page-focused and workflow-driven. Introduced as part of ASP.NET Core's evolution, Razor Pages provides a streamlined development model that emphasizes cohesion, simplicity, and productivity by organizing logic around individual pages rather than controllers.

In recent versions of .NET -- including .NET 10 -- Microsoft continues to refine the platform with enhancements to dependency injection, configuration, environment awareness, and performance. These improvements make Razor Pages an increasingly powerful choice for developers looking to build scalable web apps that are easy to understand, maintain, and evolve over time.

At Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026 in March, longtime Microsoft MVP and ASPInsider Philip Japikse will lead an intermediate-level session titled "Building Websites with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages," where he'll explore how to take full advantage of Razor Pages in the context of modern .NET web development. From deep dives into model binding and validation to practical guidance on configuration and tag helpers, Philip's session is aimed at helping developers get the most out of the ASP.NET Core 10 stack.

We caught up with Philip to talk about what excites him about ASP.NET Core Razor Pages, how it compares with traditional MVC and SPA frameworks, and what developers can expect to learn in his session.

VisualStudioMagazine: What inspired you to present a session on this topic?
Philip: I've spent a lot of time working with teams who build real business websites -- applications that need to meet business requirements while remaining understandable, maintainable, and performant. ASP.NET Core and Razor Pages provide an excellent framework to deliver those applications. I've also found that many teams using ASP.NET Core aren't taking full advantage of the powerful features already built in.

Which new feature in .NET 10 or ASP.NET Core Razor Pages are you most excited about, and why do you believe it matters to developers building new web applications now?
What excites me most isn't a single feature, but how ASP.NET Core 10 continues refining the fundamentals -- dependency injection, configuration, environment awareness, tag helpers, view components, and best-of-breed performance. Razor Pages benefits directly from these ongoing improvements, because every release makes the framework more productive, consistent, and easier to reason about.

For a developer coming from traditional MVC or older ASP.NET, what is the biggest conceptual shift when moving to Razor Pages under ASP.NET Core 10?
The biggest shift for developers coming from ASP.NET Core MVC is thinking in a page-centric manner instead of a controller-centric one. With Razor Pages, the page model owns its data, validation, and actions, which improves locality and discoverability. Developers coming from older ASP.NET also need to learn and take advantage of the modern features built into ASP.NET Core.

Can you walk through a practical example where dependency injection, environment awareness, and configuration in ASP.NET Core 10 help structure a real-world website more cleanly than in older frameworks?
While dependency injection could be added to ASP.NET Framework applications, it is part of the DNA of ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core applications are environment-aware, allowing behavior to change cleanly between environments like development and production. The modern JSON-based configuration system is a major improvement over web.config. Together, these enable the Options pattern, which allows strongly typed configuration to be injected throughout the application. For example, if an application calls an external API, each environment can define its own base URI in configuration, which is then injected wherever it's needed -- ensuring the correct endpoint is used automatically as the application moves between environments.

In your experience, under what circumstances is Razor Pages a better fit than other web frameworks like MVC or SPA frameworks (such as React or Blazor WebAssembly)?
ASP.NET Core Razor Pages excel when an application is page-centric -- think forms over data and user workflows. MVC applications, which are also server-rendered, are controller-centric and work well when there is significant shared behavior across multiple views. In practice, many applications benefit from using both MVC and Razor Pages together.

SPA frameworks like React or Blazor WebAssembly represent a different paradigm entirely and are best suited for highly interactive, component-driven experiences.

For a web application that may evolve over many years, how does ASP.NET Core 10 help with maintainability, scalability, or versioning, particularly when using Razor Pages as the foundation?
Now that ASP.NET Core has reached version 10, the platform is extremely stable. While there are occasional breaking changes, they are well-documented and relatively rare. In many cases, upgrading is as simple as changing the target framework and testing. Teams can then incrementally adopt new features at their own pace, which makes long-term maintenance far more manageable.

How can attendees learn more about this topic, and prepare for your session?
If you're already an ASP.NET Core developer using MVC, everything you know will translate directly -- I'll cover the key differences and patterns to be aware of. If you're coming from .NET Framework, Microsoft Learn offers excellent resources to get up to speed on modern .NET and ASP.NET Core.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my book, "Pro C# 10 with .NET 6." While it's a few years old, the core principles still hold up very well.

Note: Those wishing to attend the session can save money by registering early, according to the event's pricing page. "Save $300 when you register by the Extended Early Bird Savings deadline of Feb. 20," said the organizer of the event, which is presented by the parent company of Visual Studio Magazine.