.NET Core RC2 – Improvements, Schedule, and Roadmap
I am concerned that .NET Core has put .NET on a very dark path.<p>It feels like the developers have built this from a theoretical programming paradise point of view: Everything&#x27;s &quot;just&quot; a handler in a pipeline. All dependencies are now &quot;micro&quot;. Nothing has a hard dependency on anything else.<p>The result of all this is a framework that might be beautiful at it&#x27;s core, but becomes gradually more prickly as you get closer to the development surface. It feels like their answer to usability is &quot;Oh, we&#x27;ll just throw together a metapackage for that.&quot; It scares me that they think they can wrap up all the complexity they&#x27;ve created in a way that won&#x27;t lead to the developer having to dig through the .NET source to make stuff work.<p>It&#x27;s worrisome to see how brittle the system is at this late stage. It shows that this has been built from the inside-out rather than outside-in with a focus on usability. All the ugly stuff that should be buried inside the framework has been pushed out to the edge of the system for the developer to deal with. Watch any of the recent ASP.NET streams to see numerous illustrations of this whenever they open up a Core project.<p>ASP.NET used to be a reprieve from all the hideousness of other tools like NPM and Node. Now I&#x27;m seeing all the same problems in ASP.NET. Have you tried deploying a DNX &#x2F; Core app? Good luck if any file path is longer than 255 characters. Tried pulling in the dependencies from a project.json behind a corporate firewall? Good luck. It might work half the time, but it needs to work 100% of the time to be practical.<p>All these tiny metapackages will lead to dozens of projects all in intermediate undefined states whereas in the past we had a clear distinction - that repository from 2010? It&#x27;s MVC3. Ok, we know how to upgrade that because the process is well-defined. I expect ASP.NET core will be more a case of deleting out all your semver numbers from project.json, executing the update command and holding your breath. I dread this the way I dread opening any Javascript&#x2F;NPM project that&#x27;s more than a year old.<p>Given the rise of Javascript clients with REST servers I question whether it&#x27;s even worth sticking with Core when other languages can do the same thing with fewer pain points. I really want to see Core succeed but I&#x27;m just not sure about it given what we&#x27;ve seen so far.