[aggieben]

ASP.NET is pretty bare bones, all by itself. It's pretty much just a simple pipeline of request handlers with DI support (which is also optional). MVC, routing, Razor - all unnecessary if you don't want to use them.

I agree that the ASP.NET documentation is lacking in F# code samples (although the example you picked is a bad one as Razor doesn't support F#, and so naturally wouldn't have F# code samples). You might find that Giraffe is a more comfortable framework, as it's essentially an F#-ified shim on top of ASP.NET.

[kinjba11]

A lot of this thread feels like Microsoft's terrible naming having not surprising negative consequences. "ASP.NET" can mean so many things to so many people.

To me it's usually a synonym to the full-fat MVC with controllers, DI, everything. This is reinforced by most of the dotnet templates and documentation, which make it feel like if you ask for a banana you're given a gorilla and the entire forest whether you want it or not.

In comparison, if you look at Go you'll see the "net/http" package. It's the HTTP server. Extendable. Built in - not something to download from NuGet. Only does HTTP - not reinventing its own DI, configuration management, IIS, etc.