ASP.NET Core beta program

TL;DR

By popular demand we are working hard to bring ASP.NET Core support to Episerver in 2020. The first official beta drop is planned for the beginning of the year, if you want to see how things are shaping up and help us build a stack that works for you, sign-up for the closed beta here.

Upgrade path

If you’ve been following the evolution of .NET Core you probably saw the announcement earlier in the year that Microsoft are consolidating all the different critters in the .NET zoo with .NET 5 which is really just the next version of .Net Core.

It has been a confusing few years in the .Net world, but it seems clear now that .Net Core is the future of .NET which begs the question if / how / when to transition to .Net Core. If you already have a significant investment in ASP.NET 4 it probably makes sense to stay there, we will continue to support you, and add new features for the foreseeable future. If you are managing multiple sites, you can choose to host some on ASP.NET Core and some on ASP.NET 4 or move all your sites to ASP.NET Core.

In two minds

Instead of porting the entire platform to ASP.NET Core, we are building a small, fast delivery platform powered by a REST layer. The delivery platform is built to serve site visitors and depends on content from the current platform which serves editors (and ASP.NET 4 sites).

This style of decoupled architecture is old news, but until now this separation of concern only existed at the infrastructure level, with the Delivery Core we are making the cut deeper, and giving you a platform that is optimized for delivery from the ground up. We have to rethink a couple of things to make this work really well, but for current Episerver developers everything will feel very familiar; if you define your models in .Net classes, you still get nice strongly typed views, but also tag helpers, razor pages, blazor etc. etc. etc. For editors everything still works as normal, we are including support for previews, on-page-editing etc. across the two stacks.

Platform agnostic

Historically we have thought of .Net as the principal API layer for developers building sites on Episerver. With ASP.NET Core we are taking a more platform agnostic stance, by building out our existing REST APIs, effectively putting the new delivery platform on level with java, js python and other stacks.

Mi casa es su casa

The “Delivery core” wants to be part of your preferred .Net stack, so we will be moving most of the “Delivery core” to github and invite you to contribute more directly in shaping that part of the platform. We still expect to distribute everything as semantically versioned nuget packages. If you want to get a foot in the door early, and help us shape the initial release you can sign-up for the closed beta here.