Cartwright2

I'll preface this by saying I want to discuss the future viability of ASP.NET Core, to understand what others think of it, and to see what alternatives are available.

I'm worried by the direction ASP.NET Core is headed. There has been an explosion in complexity of ASP.NET Core's internals, especially the tooling systems. Microsoft has approached this new version as an opportunity to solve technical issues in the old versions but they've done so from the inside-out, in a way that exposes the developers to a lot more complexity.

Here is a comment taken from a chat between the ASP.NET Core developers where they answered a question about a property in the project.json file:

Person 1: "What does the 'imports' do in the frameworks section of project.json"?

Person 2: "So that's what I was referring to before. That's the ability to say 'Hey this project is compiling for net core app 1.0 which is the new TFM ah in the dot net CLI which represents an app that RUNS using the dot net core CLI. Basically you can type dotnet myapp and it will run uhm that TFM though no one has compiled for that TFM yet because you know it's brand new so if you go to nuget and download JSON.NET there's no TFM that matches dot net core app and the only TFM that dot net core app inherits from is the net standard TFM because we're trying to replat everything on net standard so in order to get nuget packages to correctly install into your project when they don't have assemblies or assets for that TFM you can tell the project system 'Please also import assets from these other TFMs' and then you're free to put in what ever TFM you want and we ill just blindly treat it as compatible. It may fail horribly when you try to compile or run uhm but obviously this is one of those back doors where you can say 'Hey, I know that this DLL inside TFM foo inside this package will work the way I'm using it so please just resolve it correctly and let me run'.

Person 1: "cool."

(continued in comments)