The primary purpose of ASP.NET Core Identity is authentication and authorization. It provides a framework for managing user authentication, user roles, and permissions in ASP.NET Core applications. It helps secure your application by verifying the identity of users and controlling access to resources.

Visual Studio is one of the most commonly used Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) by ASP.NET Core developers. It provides a robust set of tools and features for creating, testing, and deploying ASP.NET Core applications, making it a popular choice in the developer community.

You can extend the default IdentityUser class by creating a new class that inherits from it and adding the desired properties. This allows you to store additional information about the user in the same database table as the IdentityUser, providing a seamless integration with ASP.NET Core Identity.

Serving static files in a web application primarily aims to improve performance. By serving assets like CSS and JavaScript directly to the client's browser, it reduces the server's load and enhances the website's loading speed. This results in a better user experience and improved website performance.

For an ASP.NET Core MVC application to handle incoming HTTP requests and direct them to the appropriate controllers and actions, it must be configured to use the "Routing" middleware. Routing middleware determines how URLs are matched to controller actions, making it a critical part of request handling in MVC applications.

In an ASP.NET Core MVC project, the HTML views for the application are typically stored in the "Views" folder. Views define the structure and layout of the web pages that are displayed to users, and they are an essential part of the MVC pattern for separating concerns within the application.

The correct answer is wwwroot. In ASP.NET Core, the wwwroot folder is the designated location for storing static web assets such as images, scripts, and stylesheets. These assets can be directly accessed by clients, making it a convenient place to store files that need to be served to the browser without going through a controller or action.

In Razor syntax, the @section block is used to render a section of a view in a specified layout. This allows you to define content in different views and then include or override it in the layout view as needed.

In a route template, optional parameters are defined using curly braces {}. These allow you to specify route parameters that are optional for a particular route, providing flexibility in your URL structure.

When a custom tag helper is being used in a Razor view, it gets executed during the Execution phase of the page lifecycle. During this phase, the tag helper processes and modifies HTML elements, providing dynamic behavior to your views.