All 15 Controllers vs Minimal APIs questions
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How do you organize a large number of minimal API endpoints without ending up with an enormous, unwieldy Program.cs file? How does model binding work differently between controllers (using [FromBody], [FromQuery] attributes) and minimal APIs (using parameter inference)? Can a single ASP.NET Core project use both controllers and minimal APIs simultaneously, and what are valid reasons to do so? How do you apply the same authorization, CORS, and rate limiting policies consistently across both controllers and minimal API endpoints in a hybrid application? How do action results like Ok(), NotFound(), and BadRequest() in controllers compare to their minimal API equivalents like Results.Ok() and TypedResults? How does the underlying request execution pipeline differ in performance between controllers and minimal APIs, and what accounts for the difference? How would you decide between controllers and minimal APIs for a new project, weighing team familiarity, project complexity, and long-term maintainability? How do you implement equivalent cross-cutting concerns (like automatic model validation) in minimal APIs that [ApiController] provides automatically for controllers? How does dependency injection differ in practice between controllers (constructor injection) and minimal APIs (parameter injection)? How would you migrate an existing controller-based API to minimal APIs incrementally without a risky big-bang rewrite?
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ASP.NET Core › Controllers vs Minimal APIs

How does route-to-code discoverability differ between controllers' attribute-based routing and minimal APIs' explicit registration, and what are the trade-offs for large codebases?

Intermediate

Answer

Controllers' attribute-based routing ([HttpGet("products/{id}")] on a method) co-locates the route definition directly with its implementation, making it easy to find by opening the relevant controller file, but harder to get a bird's-eye view of an entire API's route surface without scanning every controller. Minimal APIs' explicit registration in Program.cs (or grouped extension methods) provides better at-a-glance visibility of the full route table in one place, but requires navigating away from the handler implementation itself (if defined elsewhere) to see its route.
// Controllers: route and implementation co-located, but scattered across many files
[HttpGet("{id}")]
public IActionResult Get(int id) => Ok(_service.GetById(id));  // route right here

// Minimal APIs: centralized route table, implementation possibly in a separate file
app.MapGet("/products/{id}", ProductHandlers.GetById);  // route here, logic elsewhere
Real-world example A new team member onboarding to a minimal-API-based project quickly understands the full route surface by skimming a handful of MapXEndpoints() extension method files, compared to a controller-based sibling project requiring them to open dozens of individual controller files to build the same mental map.

Common follow-ups: How do tools like Swagger/OpenAPI mitigate this discoverability difference for API consumers regardless of implementation style?;What organizational conventions maximize discoverability for each approach?

API Documentation with Swagger/OpenAPI;Endpoint Metadata Route Constraints & Templates
All 15 Controllers vs Minimal APIs questions