As you Know MVC is three layer architecture.
- Model
- View
- Controller
Model is the data entities. You need to store, or show the data.
Views are the html or presentation layer which would be rendered to users.
Controller are the code behind file all of your code would go in controller. It gets data from Models and apply business logic and then pass to views to show or get updated data from view and pass to models and then save to database.
_layout.cshtml file is present at path of ~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml
. It is master-page in mvc. You would see your partial-views contains
Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";
this line at top of page. You can change master-page for any views and you can have multiple Layouts.
Layout contains many partial-views like left-navigation, Top-Navigation and content. each of which can be customized from controller.
Here are some links might help you: