Chapter 1. Getting Started with ASP.NET Core and Bootstrap 4

As developers, we can find it difficult to create great-looking user interfaces from scratch when using HTML and CSS. This is especially hard when developers have extensive experience developing Windows Forms applications. Microsoft introduced Web Forms to remove the complexities of building websites and to ease the switch from Windows Forms to the Web. This in turn makes it very hard for Web Forms developers, and even harder for Windows Forms developers, to switch to ASP.NET MVC. Bootstrap is a set of stylized components, plugins, and a layout grid that takes care of the heavy lifting. Microsoft has included Bootstrap in all ASP.NET MVC project templates since 2013.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Files included in the Bootstrap distribution
• How to create an empty ASP.NET site and enable MVC and static files
• Adding the Bootstrap files using Bower
• Automatically compile the Bootstrap Sass files using Gulp
• Installing additional icon sets
• How to create a Layout file that references the Bootstrap files