Is it possible to serve .aspx files via dotnet core (i.e. Kestrel)?

Question

I have a bunch of simple .aspx files providing simple web pages for testing purposes. I'm running Linux and have no access to a Windows machine.

I could convert the .aspx pages into something else (NodeJS using Express, perhaps) but I risk altering the logic through mistakes as I make this conversion. This is my fallback position.

My current goal is to use dotnet core to build an environment into which I can drop each .aspx file (one at a time is fine) and see it running in a webserver as it was intended. I've constructed the base of such an environment via:

$ dotnet new -t web
$ dotnet restore
$ dotnet run

This gives me a working webserver running a default website on localhost:5000 - great! However I can't get it to execute, or even read, .aspx files; http://localhost:5000/favicon.ico does read the contents of wwwroot/favicon.ico, yet dumping foo.aspx into wwwroot/ and trying out http://localhost:5000/foo.aspx gives a 404 - I was expecting at least a 500 demanding that I configure serving of .aspx, or perhaps a 200 with the literal contents of foo.aspx, but 404? I added a wwwroot/test.txt file with new contents and it serves that just fine as static content.

Thinking I might be able to (ab)use the MVC setup I'd been provided by the default template I set up a new controller FooController, dumped foo.aspx into Views/Foo/Index.cshtml and got the thing executing finally, hacked the .cshtml file so it looked like the other provided .cshtml files (really just replacing <% %> with @{ }) and it still doesn't work because this .aspx file references Request.Form["data"] so I get an error: "The name 'Request' does not exist in the current context".

Am I barking up the wrong tree? I don't have any experience with ASPX or the new MVC infrastructure. My task is to translate code in Java to Python & Ruby that acts against these provided web pages. Can I easily serve the .aspx files on Kestrel or should I fall back to translating the ASPX stuff over to NodeJS?

Please note that suitability for a production environment is not relevant here; this is purely for dev testing and will not be served to the wider internet, or indeed anywhere except localhost.

Answer 1

At this point, ASP.NET Web Forms are not supported in will not be supported with .NET Core.

You could easily get a VM with Windows and run it from there.