ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs

Practical approaches to designing, organizing, testing, and generating ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, including source generation and OpenAPI-driven contracts.

ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs remove much of the ceremony traditionally associated with defining HTTP endpoints, but keeping the endpoint declaration small does not remove the design decisions around it. As an application grows, questions about organization, testability, dependency injection, contracts, and generated plumbing become more important than the syntax used to map a route.

The articles below explore those questions from several angles. They cover discovering and registering endpoints without maintaining a central list, structuring handlers so they remain easy to invoke directly in tests, generating endpoint plumbing at compile time, and treating an OpenAPI document as an input rather than something produced only after the implementation exists.

Some of the approaches use source generation and deliberately opinionated conventions. Others are useful even if the application stays entirely handwritten. The goal is not to prescribe one architecture for every Minimal API application, but to make the trade-offs explicit as the codebase grows beyond a handful of endpoints.

The common theme is keeping HTTP plumbing small without allowing important application structure or API contracts to become implicit.

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