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Stylized letter A in teal with pink sparkle accents Khalid Abuhakmeh

The ASP.NET Apocalypse Is Coming

/ 3 min read

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I am excited about ASP.NET 5, and so are many of my team members. As excited as I am, I am just as concerned about the new landscape on the horizon. The biggest question isn’t wether Microsoft and the ASP.NET team will deliver, but whether the Open Source (OSS) ecosystem will.

The majority of packages on Nuget.org are written for the full versions of .NET from 2.0 to 4.6. Few OSS authors have started porting to the next version of .NET and many have a few options ahead of them:

  1. Do nothing and not support ASP.NET 5
  2. Port to ASP.NET 5
  3. Help others write comparable libraries for ASP.NET 5

In my opinion, the ASP.NET 5 reboot also reboots the OSS ecosystem, although a softer one. Many of the packages on Nuget.org will become inaccessible by those looking to move to ASP.NET 5. You could stick to the full version of the .NET framework and forgo the CoreCLR, but then why even make the leap to a new paradigm? From my experience, there is a steep learning curve to the next version of ASP.NET and unless one were to take advantage of the new capabilities, they would be better served not moving off of the full framework.

All said, we are still in the beta phase of the release cycle and potentially most OSS authors are just waiting for the surface API of ASP.NET 5 to settle, which it should have in beta8. The time between now and January 2016 is when I would imagine the gearing up for ASP.NET 5 and its Nuget ecosystem will begin to gain momentum.

For most developers interested in OSS and .NET, this is an amazing opportunity to impact the new .NET ecosystem as it will most likely be a free-for-all for mind share in the space. While trusted OSS brands may have a slight advantage retraining their fans, they might lose out to new libraries if they wait to long to port. Open source projects are packaged opinions. By having more users, it gives authors an ability to proliferate their opinions to a larger group of the ecosystem.

I’m excited about the future and ultimately just want to build applications that make users happy. I’ve built a toolset of OSS libraries that have helped me accomplish that to date, but come January 2016 the landscape will look drastically different. If I must build my own libraries to replace some of those tools then I must, but I’m hoping that others join me in trying to boost a new world order.

It’s my opinion while things are going to break, they’ll be better in the long run.

If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll, uh… you’ll go insane.

  • Max Rockatansky

P.S. Watch Mad Max Fury Road, it is awesome :)

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