Razor Tag Helpers in ASP.NET Core simplify server-side code in Razor views by providing a more natural way to work with HTML elements and attributes. They make it easier to integrate server-side logic into your views while maintaining clean and readable code.

The primary purpose of the Register action in an ASP.NET Core Identity controller is to handle user registration. It processes user-provided information, such as username, password, and email, and creates a new user account in the system, allowing them to log in subsequently.

The @layout Razor directive is used at the beginning of a view file to specify its layout page in ASP.NET Core MVC. It allows you to define the layout that should be applied to the current view, providing a consistent structure for your web pages.

The main reason for integrating automated tests into a CI pipeline is to ensure code quality. Automated tests help catch bugs early in the development process, improve the reliability of the application, and provide confidence that changes won't introduce regressions. This ultimately leads to a higher-quality product.

The file extension typically used to define shared Razor directives that can be utilized across multiple views is .razorimports. This file allows you to specify common directives or 'using' statements that should apply to multiple Razor views, streamlining your code and maintaining consistency.

A primary feature of ASP.NET Core Identity is user registration and management. It allows you to create, update, and manage user accounts, including features like user registration, login, password reset, and role-based access control (RBAC).

The UseExceptionHandler middleware is used to display custom error pages to users when an unhandled exception occurs. UseDeveloperExceptionPage, on the other hand, shows detailed exception information during development, but it's not suitable for production as it can leak sensitive information.

Middleware in ASP.NET Core plays a critical role in processing web requests. It sits between the web server and your application, allowing you to handle HTTP requests and responses. Each middleware component can perform tasks like routing, authentication, logging, and more.

To ensure that only the blog author can edit or delete a post, you would apply the [Authorize] attribute to the Edit and Delete actions in the controller. This allows you to specify authorization at the action level, and you can further customize it to check if the user making the request is the author of the post being edited or deleted. Applying [Authorize] to the entire controller would restrict access to all actions within it, which is not the desired behavior in this case. [Authorize(Roles = "Admin")] is role-based authorization and doesn't address this scenario, and [AllowAnonymous] would allow everyone, which is the opposite of the desired behavior.

After code is committed to a version control system (e.g., Git), the next typical step in a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline is the build process. During the build, the code is compiled, tested, and packaged, preparing it for deployment to different environments.