Creating a project is more than just clicking "File > New". For a 12-year professional, the decisions you make in the first 5 minutes will dictate the scalability of the next 5 years.
When you create an ASP.NET Core MVC project, you have 3 major choices:
A senior architect immediately checks the .csproj file. Here are the 3 settings that will save your life:
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
<Nullable>enable</Nullable> <!-- Avoid NullReferenceExceptions! -->
<ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings> <!-- Cleaner code, fewer imports. -->
</PropertyGroup>
Senior developers use global.json to lock their project to a specific .NET SDK version. This ensures that every developer on your 50-person team uses the exact same compiler version, preventing "It works on my machine" bugs in production!