The goal of building an image is to package your application in a portable, self-contained unit. The image should be as small as possible, so it's easy to move around when you want to run the application, and it should have as few OS features as possible, so it has a fast startup time and a small attack vector.

Docker doesn't impose restrictions on the image size. Your long-term goal may be to build minimal images that run lightweight .NET Core applications on Linux or Nano Server. But you can start by packaging your existing ASP.NET apps in their entirety as Docker images to run on Windows Server Core. Docker also doesn't impose restrictions on how to package your app, so you can choose from different approaches.