Today is a big day for Web Developers who work on open-source technologies, as Microsoft has today announced the release of the first stable version of its ASP.NET Core. The aim to update the architecture is to make the open-source Core leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized.
Microsoft announced the open-source ASP.NET Core Project in late 2014. It further cited two main reasons for this move: one to make the ecosystem stronger and accessible to all and other to lay the foundation of a cross-platform .NET framework. And it has finally succeeded in making the open-source platform available to developers across platforms, including Windows(of course!), Linux and the Mac. One can even develop and run applications on Android and iOS using Xamarin.
The .NET Core is arriving alongside ASP.NET Core 1.0, the open source, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s Web development stack. And it is built on the same Core stack for maximum compatibility.
If you want to build a new application that will be deployed to a Docker Container or a micro-service that will interact with an existing app, then you should try ASP.NET Core to deploy the changes.
Key Improvements
With the official release of ASP.NET Core 1.0, you gain the following foundational improvements:
- Build and run cross-platform ASP.NET apps on Windows, Mac and Linux(as also mentioned above)
- Built on .NET Core, which supports true side-by-side app versioning.
- New tooling that simplifies modern Web development.
- Single aligned web stack for Web UI and Web APIs
- Cloud-ready environment-based configuration
- Built-in support for dependency injection
- Tag Helpers which makes Razor markup more natural with HTML
- Ability to host on IIS or self-host in your own process
These improved and mature functionalities will feel very familiar and help you with modern web development.
Red Hat Partnership
After years of non-cooperation amongst Redmond and the world’s biggest open-source operating system Linux, Microsoft finally announced a partnership with RedHat in late 2015. This led to the deployment of RedHat packages on Microsoft flexible cloud network Azure and support for .NET framework. But, today it has announced that it will be the first Linux Distro to officially support the complete ASP Core 1.0.
This will now allow enterprises to run microservices-based applications that include both .NET and Java components on the same platform, be it Windows server or RedHat Linux servers. Microsoft will also make the Core capabilities available for Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS in the near future.
For future updates, Microsoft is trying to add even more capabilities to the Core. As the blogpost mentions that,
We’re also researching how to bring the ‘Web Sites’ project model from ASP.NET into the Core framework by supporting something we’re calling ‘Controllerless Views’.
When Microsoft moved towards a more open-source approach towards web development, it also setup a .NET Foundation to keep track of the development. The foundation has since then seen many organisations become a part of it, including the aforementioned RedHat, Unity(game engine) and even JetBrains(game environment developer). And today, alongside all the new releases it has also added Samsung as one of the partners in the foundation.
Microsoft is expected to show-off many more open-source technologies at the RedHat Summit, but the one that will likely gather most attention is SQL Server 2016 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
To know how to install or deploy packages using ASP.NET Core on different platforms, read the in-depth blogpost right here.
