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ASP.NET Core: New Preview Out as Survey Says It's Going Mainstream
Things are happening fast for ASP.NET Core, as Microsoft just released a new Version 2.2.0 preview while a recent developer survey indicates the Web dev framework is quickly becoming a mainstream option.
ASP.NET Core does for Microsoft's legacy ASP.NET what .NET Core does for .NET Framework: It takes the company's Web dev tech and modernizes it with an open source offering that's leaner, more modular and cross-platform. That makes it an increasingly popular choice for cloud-based, Internet-connected applications including Web apps, Web services, Internet-of-Things (IoT) projects, mobile back-ends and more.
"I think ASP.NET Core is the biggest game changer in the history of Web development using the Microsoft stack," asserts Philip Japikse, developer, coach, author, teacher, Microsoft MVP and Visual Studio Live! presenter, in a recent article titled "Hands-On with ASP.NET Core and EF Core".
According to a recent Progress Telerik survey, many ASP.NET developers apparently agree. "ASP.NET Core is quickly becoming mainstream," said Telerik's John Bristowe in a recent blog post titled "ASP.NET Intersections 2018: Developers Share their Platform Choice."
Bristowe, a member of the Developer Relations team at Progress Software, said that while ASP.NET MVC will continue to be the leading .NET Web technology in the near future (with 57 percent of respondents saying it will be either their primary or secondary technology over the next year), the 2-year-old .NET Core is gaining fast.
"ASP.NET Core has had a surge of adoption (+10 percent) at the cost to all other ASP.NET technologies," he said. "ASP.NET Core is clearly a point of focus for the ASP.NET development community."
The survey, conducted in June, also shows continuing strong use of the much more mature ASP.NET Web Forms option, with 27 percent of respondents naming it as their primary/secondary choice for upcoming projects (compared to the aforementioned 57 percent for ASP.NET MVC, and 49 percent for ASP.NET Core.
Nevertheless, Bristowe said, "When it comes to ASP.NET, the best, long-term bet is [to] target ASP.NET Core. This is where most of the innovation is occurring in terms of features and overall performance."
[Click on image for larger view.] ASP.NET technologies being targeted (as a whole) over the next 12 months, excluding respondents who won't develop any .NET Web projects in the next 12 months. (source: Progress Telerik).
Meanwhile, Microsoft just yesterday (Aug. 22), announced ASP.NET Core 2.2.0-preview1 is now available.
In the preview, Web templates have been updated to Bootstrap 4 and Angular 6, and the ASP.NET Core team will be highlighting other new features in the preview in a series of blog posts, covering:
- API Controller Conventions
- Endpoint Routing
- Health Checks
- HTTP/2 in Kestrel
- Improvements to IIS hosting
- SignalR Java client
Right now, blog posts are available for
Health Checks (used by a container orchestrator or load balancer to quickly determine if a system is responding to requests normally) and
HTTP/2 in Kestrel (a major revision of the HTTP protocol with support for header compression and fully multiplexed streams over the same connection).
More information on preview1 -- primarily published to solicit feedback to help the team refine and improve the product in time for the final release -- is available in the release notes.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.