I was looking into ASP.NET Core
since its inception and here I got a chance to write a small post on a Visual
Studio Template Pack. ASP.NET core was released in last year as a complete rewrite
of .NET framework 4.6 and comes with a new architecture based on .NET Core.
Furthermore, Microsoft highlights that “it was architected to provide an
optimized development framework for apps that are deployed to the cloud or run
on premises”.
Unlike in good old days, I pay
attention to a good starting point when I’m building a new application. In that
sense, I prefer my tools to be configured in a way that I don’t have to rebuild
my client application and publish all changes made to TypeScript and CSS files
without interrupting reloading pages. Also, when building the application, it
would be nice to have separate builds for development and production. Where
production builds can be as minimal as possible to include only what it needs,
whereas development builds may contain necessary source maps to aid debugging. Finally,
I found ASP.NET
Core Template Pack after having a quick search in Visual Studio
Marketplace, which satisfies above requirements as a preconfigured starting
point.
I remember the time Grunt was
introduced to me, and Webpack is the 2016 version of Grunt. I need a build
setup before I run my application since it is mostly written in TypeScript. Therefore,
Webpack is responsible for compilation, building and minification. This
template is relying on Webpack Dev Middleware usage; hence it is easy to
continue changes or modifications to the code already compiled and even to view
them in seconds. In this case Webpack compiler remains active in memory and
serves incremental compilations to new modification. This also enables the hot
module replacement.
Overall my experience with
ASP.NET Core Template Pack has been good and I really recommend this as a
starting point for ASP.NET projects that uses Angular 2 in frontend. Happy
coding 😊
