ASP.NET Core Modules are self-contained units of an app that you can compose into a new app. Modules include functionality for high-level features like billing, search, identity, commenting, product reviews, blogs, image galleries, etc. Modules provide services, endpoints, views and static resources as a single unit. Modules can be easily packaged, shared and acquired so that developers can take advantage of a rich ecosystem of reusable components when building applications. Modules can depend on and extend other modules to create domain specific ecosystems.

Prebuilt packages available on MyGet (https://www.myget.org/feed/Packages/aspnetcoremodules).

Modules are just ASP.NET Core projects that have been packaged as a NuGet package.

To use MVC from within a module package you must set the preserveCompilationContext setting to true in your project.json file and then modify the embedded .deps file in the module assembly as follows:

• Dissassemble the module assembly

  ildasm /out=Module1.il Module1.dll

• Overwrite the module .deps file with the published .deps file for the module. This will filter out any dependencies of type "build".

• Update the .deps file to change any library of type "project" to type "package".

• Update the compilation and runtime paths for the project libraries to the correct paths in their NuGet package (ex Module1.dll -> lib/netcoreapp1.1/Module1.dll).

• Reassemble the assembly

  ilasm /resource=Module1.res /dll /out=Module.dll Module1.il

Module content files can be included in the module package using the NuGet contentFiles feature. Support for contentFiles is not available in .NET Core projects, so the module package must be created manually using NuGet.exe.

Modules can optionally define a ConfigureSharedServices method in their startup class to share service with other modules.

You can use MVC as you normally would from any ASP.NET Core app.

To support link generation to endpoints in a module you need to share your module routes as a service. Setup the route sharing service by calling services.AddMvcWithSharedRoutes() and then share the route by calling app.UseMvcWithSharedRoutes().