So how does a view page in a Razor app work? In order for a file to behave as a Razor view page, the first line in the file must be @page. The @page directive indicates that the file is a Razor Page and the ASP.NET compiler will treat it as such. This means that we can now write C# code in our view page and HTML markup.

When a user navigates to a web page, the web browser submits a “request” to the web server to return the contents of the web page so that it can display it to the user. That request is handled by Razor Pages, and specifically, the Razor engine that looks at the view file (.cshtml) of the specific page the user wishes to see and produces the HTML content based on the code implemented in that view.

In order for the Razor engine to interpret code as C# instead of HTML, we must prepend the keyword with the “@“ symbol, otherwise, it will read the code as HTML. We’ll look at a few different ways we can write C# in our view page in the next exercise.