There are two major scenarios that we are targeting on top of Core:

- ASP.NET 5 web apps and services - see: https://github.com/aspnet/home - Native executables - see: https://github.com/dotnet/corert/blob/master/Documentation/i...

What do you think?

Disclosure: .NET Core team member

I LOVE it.

I've been building in MVC3/4 for the last few years so have quite a bit of experience with how MS has been evolving in this space. From "BundleTransformers" through "Web Essentials" and now suddely all the way to GULP

I started building a weekend and evenings project in EF7+MVC6 at Beta6 and have suffered through breaking changes in beta7 & 8 but each stage of the way I've enjoyed myself.

Some of the things that I have recently struggled with is getting the project working on linux VMs and docker.

While I can get boilerplate projects working, this "bigger" project struggles to compile on docker.

Part of it may be my own fault since I've split the solution into multiple projects ("WEB", "API", "MODEL") where MVC6 seems to have a paradigm of keeping everything in the same project, but it does seem to work OK on a windows 10 host (I keep wanting to test it on azure but that's another story)

There isn't any clear path as of yet from "building something that runs locally in VS" to getting it hosted in a "massively scalable cloud of containers"

I'm exploring docker and kubernetes at the moment - but progress is slow :)

Additionally - in terms of development - I'd like to see some more scaffolding, like I see with (for example) strongloop/loopback in node.js I'm finding that my API breaks down in .NET when I try and use an EF entity around since we get into circular JSON references.

Anyways, I'm starting to get off on a tangent. I really do like what I see in .NET5 though feel there are some pains in places. Specifically around containerizing & rapid application development.

I'm aiming to have a demo of ASPNET5 on Kubernetes within two weeks. :) I'm having to figure out a lot along the way. I wish the aspnet team would take direct ownership of their docker image. There's no reason that the aspnet team can't be putting out new docker images every night with the latest DNX and MVC bits pre-loaded ready to go.

There are these docker images. Do they work for your needs?

https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/aspnet/

Kinda. I think it'd be better if the aspnet team's CI system would upload new dnx packages to myget... and then also build a new docker image with the latest dnx bits baked in.

That way I can try the latest and greatest of rc2 without having to rebuild my container every time new packages go up on myget.

It's a pretty minor ask... I'm probably one of a very small number of people that are stubborn enough to be on the bleeding edge (using rc2 when rc1 is the latest release, etc)

Thanks! That's actually awesome and covers both use cases I care about personally. I am going to download it later today and try out - been preparing myself by reading C# code over past few weeks, so this is perfect timing.

I am interested in finding out how it compares right now to Java for building web apps and services - in terms of DB access, various ORM stuff etc.

How about F#? Is it viable through .NET Core on non-Windows platforms?

The F# team is working on getting F# working on .NET Core. It's an important goal for the team.

You can follow their progress: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/pulls?utf8=&q=is%3...

Looking forward to it. Thanks for the fast reply.

I think it's awesome. I've been a Mac/Linux convert for over a decade now but I really really like C# and ASP.NET. The Visual Studio Code editor is awesome, the command utilities work great so far.

Wait. Wait. Are you saying it is now possible to write c#/ASP on mac?

For a few years now, but yes, now with support in Production.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/OmniSharpMakingCrossplatformNE...

Also http://get.asp.net and http://code.visualstudio.com

Where is an example of this. I write Node and Django on Linode since they provide great service, have a lot of flexibility and don't have extravagant and hard to predict prices for a VPS. It seems I have no options of running a C# website or project from my Ubuntu 14.04 without installing Mono. Is this accurate or are you saying somehow I can run an ASP.NET website from my Linode?

And assuming I can, is anybody else doing this? In the past it seems like production Mono makes no sense when Python and Node just work without additional libraries to make it work.

You have been able to write C# for a while now.

Where is an example of this on Ubuntu? possibly a .NET site running on Ubuntu?

I like C# and .NET because of VS and the dev tools that make my life easier. Is there an intent to have VS running on Linux ?

Edit : Not talking about Visual Studio Code, but the -original- Visual Studio IDE.

VS Code is VS for Linux [1]

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

I haven't used VS Code in a long time (since the very early versions when it cam) and I remember that it didn't meet my needs. What I like about VS is its project templates, dynamic auto-complete, integrated terminal, amazing visual git (and diff) integration... Are these available in VS Code ?

Mostly "Yes, to a certain extent".

Maybe not project templates, they seem to be targeting Yeoman as the use case for "getting started".

But autocomplete and git integration are definitely there. In some ways better than how VS does it.

What extension you use to git and diff functionality please?

Nope, actually. It's a "simple" text editor for coders, like atom and stuff

VS is too dependent on Windows to make the switch easy I believe.

VS code seems to be catching up very rapidly though. Especially with the extensibility announced today https://code.visualstudio.com/updates

It may still be a while before is "surpasses" true VS - but - with support for sublime and textmate snippets it may be about to catch up to those two.

We're interested in running .NET web servers (currently NancyFX-based) in Docker containers on CoreOS. I think that may be covered by the ASP.NET 5 scenario.

Has the ASP.NET request processing pipeline changed significantly in v5? Last time I checked, our fork of Nancy only really cares about _Init, _BeginRequest, and the unhandled exception handler.

You may have to rewrite part of your fork.

ASP.NET 5 is essentially based on OWIN as a pipeline which uses a pipeline of async Func calls (that can be wrapped up into "middleware" components). NancyFX, actually implements an OWIN middleware which I think would be easy to tie into ASP.NET 5, but I haven't tried yet.

We've been using Nancy with the OWIN self-hosted HTTPListener for a couple years. Couldn't be a whole lot easier. IIS can die in a fire.

What's wrong with IIS?

It's a bad fit for most of the things I need to do. Especially for systems that have a lot of background processing, but need a web front-end (because enterprise, and dashboards!), it is a drag to have everything go down because IIS has decided to recycle your app pool due to 20 minutes of front-end inactivity. Yes, you can change the settings to disable that, or architect things differently to separate the UI from the background service, but it is extra complexity that is a pain. Building a Windows service that has a light-weight webserver built into it is much easier.

IIS also has too many knobs that can get fiddled and frig things up. Before we switched, I'd always be on support calls to help a customer fix one of our products after their sysadmin tweaked something in a way to break us, or installed some other piece of software that stomped on us.

IIS also has a very conservative set of defaults if you naively install it. Seriously, I've seen a lot of instances where customers install IIS, and CSS doesn't get served - you have to install an additional Static Content module. People don't read instructions, or bother to run required setup scripts. So you have to do a bunch of additional work with less-than-friendly installer authoring programs to make sure that features that any self-respecting web server ought to have out of the box are available.

Completely agree that it's wrong for certain use cases. And it is a complex tool, but I personally like the flexibility.

The pipeline is pretty different in ASP.NET 5 - it's shifted to a pluggable middleware system rather than a canned set of events. More info here: https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/fundamentals/middleware.html

Any chance of migrating and/or open sourcing WCF to Linux next? What's in the pipeline?

WCF client is already open. That's a great place to engage.

https://github.com/dotnet/wcf

Hey, been using ASP.NET 5 on Linux since beta 5 and really love it so far! Keep up the great work. I hope to contribute a bit in the future when I have some more free time.

Wow.. does it mean I can write console app in c# and compile it to native executable for osx or linux?

Any updates on Powershell for other OS's?

I've completely switched to ScriptCs[0] for my scripting needs. Works on all platforms that Core supports.

[0]: http://scriptcs.net

God forbid! PowersHell can really drive you to insanity with half-swallowed chained exceptions (pointing to the initial caller) and its return-everything-from-procedures behaviour.

Could we get started with .NET MVC on Mac OS?

Yes! Check out: https://get.asp.net/OtherDownloads

Also, check out these docs:

https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/tutorials/your-first-mac-aspn...

https://docs.asp.net/projects/mvc/en/latest/

The big issue, is SQL Server the only production ready database supported? SQL Server is not a viable option in the open source world. There is an Alpha version of the PostgreSQL npgsql driver, not sure how solid it is.

Moreover, is CoreCLR production ready on Linux? I haven't read 3rd party critical reviews or comparisons against JVM/Go/node.js on Linux. I don't have fond memories of putting faith in Mono/XSP.

.net supports all major database providers. But may need to wait for them to be made compatible with coreclr.

Think of how things could have been if this were done since ASP.NET v1...

Different eras, different revenue sources, different incentives.

In the days of ASP.NET v1, MS made money from server licences to run IIS and ASP.

These days they want to make money from Azure, and they make money regardless of if it's hosting .Net, PHP, Java or node.js; or on linux or windows. The .Net open stack becomes a loss leader. Ironically, it's also going to greatly improve .Net on AWS.

The last time I checked out Azure there were no shortage of ways to get locked into their ecosystem. My favorite though is this guy https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/mac...

Yeah, I was thinking this too... that's when I was a .NET developer. Then the alt.net train started and (ironically?) lead me to discover the world outside the .NET and windows ecosystem. If things were more cross-platform back at the time I probably would have stuck around.

    @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "&{iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1'))}"

Hmmmmmmmm. Technically they do. Can't tell if this is a joke...

Alright, let's be fair here. If you have a sensible execution policy set which you basically have to the first time you use powershell it is only:

Invoke-WebRequest https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1 | Invoke-Expression

or this for short:

iwr https://dist.asp.net/dnvm/dnvminstall.ps1 | iex

Also, the powershell package manager is quite nice. So far it is basically chocolatey for me but if there are some more it can handle in the future... https://github.com/OneGet/oneget/issues/77

Yeah, unfortunately that nice clean syntax requires a fairly recent version of PowerShell so the code we actually use has to be a bit verbose for compat :)

Source/Disclaimer: I work for the ASP.NET team

heh, the Microsoft curl|sh.

Yeah, they copied a lot of the syntax over. To the point that there is an alias for curl by default. Probably a good thing, though.

That got a lot boilerplate on it on purpose, to make you have the right ExecutionPolicy(Powershell won't let you run random scripts, unless you override it), etc.

Wondering if it actually uses CoreCLR on Linux/Mac.. it definitely did not for quite a long time.

It does! Mono is still an option but CoreCLR is also considered supported and ready to use in the RC.