Technology is ever-changing, and the options available to product teams continue to expand. Coordinating a team around a technology stack can be challenging, but it’s a necessary practice to enable faster delivery.
In this article, we’ll show you how we worked with one product delivery team to realize the benefits of adopting .Net Core and developed a template application that could be used for future development efforts.
Making the Move to .Net Core
First, it was important for the team to understand why investing in a new framework was worthwhile. Though there is a long list of benefits to the .Net Core framework, some highlights are:
- Cross–platform: You can build applications on Mac, Linux, and Windows. This opens a lot of options for cloud-native applications.
- Cloud-native friendly: With the ability to host within IIS, Nginx or Apache, many PaaS options, such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Azure Web Apps, become first class approaches. However, with the addition of the self-hosting capabilities within .Net core, Docker and/or Kubernetes can easily be integrated to host your application through the dotnet command line.
- Built with best practice in mind: Features such as built-in Dependency Injection, Built-in Logging, and making testability a focus provide solid foundations for teams to implement a maintainable code base.
- Open source: ASP.Net Core is open source and community focused, allowing developers to see under the covers and submit changes to help impact the direction of the framework.
- The path forward: Microsoft will be investing more in new feature development on .Net Core than the ASP.Net framework. .Net Core is the future!
Enlisting Professional Help
As the product delivery team focused on achieving results for their customers, they realized that creating a kickstarter template and coordinating everyone around a technology stack would enable them to deliver faster and reduce onboarding time overall. Since researching options, gathering opinions, and agreeing on technical decisions was proving to be too time intensive, they determined it was a good idea to seek an external consultant to help them gain traction quickly.
Getting Started
As a result, we developed a template ASP.NET Core 2.1 web application that the team can use as a foundation for future development efforts. Based upon the requirements, we created a dockerized version of an ASP.NET Core web application with an Angular 6 SPA that incorporated best practices for web application development.
The .net core kickstarter template provided:
- Full tech stack from UI to API to Database: An Angular 6 SPA built on top of ASP.Net core. The solution incorporated front to back logging, demonstrated best practices for Angular/ASP.Net multi-tier development and messaging using SignalR Core.
- Prototype migrated to Angular utilizing Bootstrap/Material: An existing UI built in HTML/CSS was incorporated into Angular components & utilized material design.
- Containerized Solution & Azure DevOps Pipeline: To enable ease of onboarding, a Docker image was created from the template. The Docker image was created from an Azure DevOps Pipeline to enable ease of onboarding for the team.
- Integration with SSO: A key requirement was integration with a SSO provider to demonstrate best practices within .net core and Angular regarding security. Auth0 was used as the demonstration platform.
If you have a new cloud-native development opportunity and want to future protect your investment, there’s no better time to get started with the .Net Core framework. For help with kickstarting the process, 
and learn more about our .Net Core template.
