ASP.NET Core, the cross-platform and open-source framework is developed by Microsoft for building modern, cloud-based, and internet-connected applications. Designed to enable runtime components, APIs, compilers, and languages to evolve quickly, it runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows on the .NET Core or .NET Framework.
To know more about the development cycle of ASP.NET Core and to gain knowledge of its future design directions, we interviewed Kenneth Y. Fukizi, the author of the book ‘Learn ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’, published by Packt Publishing. He has more than 14 years of professional experience and is working as a software engineering contractor/consultant for client organizations based in South Africa, Australia, U.S.A, and Canada.
Kenneth believes that the current performance of ASP.NET Core is a lot more superior than its predecessors and its competitor frameworks. He prefers to use ASP.Net Core to build enterprise web applications due to the flexibility that comes with it. He is also excited that .Net 5 will have more interoperability with other programming languages. When asked about his thoughts on Microsoft supporting the open source platform Pulumi, Kenneth says it will definitely help developers in building modern cloud applications.
| If you are an ASP.NET Core user, you should definitely read part 1 of our interview with ‘Kenneth Fukizi on the new Blazor framework, gRPC support, and other exciting features in ASP.NET Core 3.0’. In this interview, he shares his impressions on all the new exciting features in the ASP.NET Core 3.0 release and explains why all ASP.Net Core users should be looking forward to the high performance and scalability that comes with gRPC in this new release. |
On ASP.NET Core’s longevity and future design directions
At the NDC conference held recently, Ryan Nowak, a Microsoft developer and architect on ASP.NET Core shared the details of many future projects like BedRock, Houdini and SMALL FAST.NET Server. The common goal of these projects is to simplify cross-platform compatibility among different environments. How do you think these projects will help in shaping the future design directions of .NET 5 and ensure the longevity of ASP.NET Core?
.Net 5 is already in the process of being put together, with the full knowledge of what is happening around project Bedrock, project Houdini and SMALL FAST.NET server. What I can personally see from project Bedrock is the fact that starting at the lowest layer there is going to be more prominence of .Net Sockets in dealing with Network I/O at the expense of Libuv borrowed from NodeJS for its cross-platform capabilities. Obviously .Net Sockets will learn a thing or two from how Libuv has been operating and implement the lessons learned so that it works seamlessly with .Net technologies, and .Net 5 will stand to benefit a lot from the improvements.
I personally see .Net 5 being influenced to cater for more protocols like MQTT, AMQP, HTTP3, and QUIC, and I wouldn’t be surprised to even see a bit more interoperability with other programming languages on .Net 5. ASP.Net Core is there to stay as it is designed to work exclusively on the .Net Core runtime, which is transitioning into .Net 5 soon.
I can see a lot of improvements on ASP.Net Core 3.0 especially from the point of view of taking a bit more responsibility off the MVC framework onto ASP.Net Core as a platform. This will allow reuse of functionality across different frameworks like SignalR, gRPC services, Blazor, Controllers, and Pages. This is already happening as is evident in the use of endpoint routing, which is catering for all of what I call the big 5 frameworks on project Houdini, mentioned above.
Taking away responsibility from MVC to a lower layer actually makes it more lightweight and developer-friendly, and does not actually kill MVC as you can see it is pretty much still alive, and all this restructuring, in general, makes it more flexible to deal with change in the future, that is characteristic of different platforms, and actually makes it more ready in becoming truly cross-platform.