Two weeks ago, the ASP.NET team announced during the weekly ASP.NET Community Standup and on our blogs it was decided to rename ASP.NET 5 to ASP.NET Core 1.0. This announcement generated great questions that I’ll answer in this post. I’ll also update you on our progress with the ASP.NET Core and .NET Core releases.
Why Do I Still See ASP.NET 5 in Various Official Places?
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| It Looks Insoluble by David Goehring / CC BY 2.0 |
In the interest of transparency, we decided to disclose the name change before the changes were committed to GitHub. We didn’t want to surprise everyone with a flood of renames and changes to projects and documentation. Now that we are doing development in the open on the framework, tools, and documentation, you can see these changes in our code as we make them. We wanted to make a public statement about this change to ensure that you – our technical community – were all aware of the change at the same time, before code and documents started changing.
The current version that is available to download from NuGet and is compatible with Visual Studio tool is still called ASP.NET 5. You will find this now deprecated name still in place at www.asp.net/vnext until we are ready to ship a version of ASP.NET Core to customers. At that point, we will update the name online everywhere.
What are the versions for MVC and Web API?
The whole “ASP.NET 5 MVC 6 Web API 2″ sub-component versioning scheme was confusing. We’ve been working towards “One ASP.NET” now for years and we’re there. ASP.NET Core is versioned as 1.0 as it’s a near complete rewrite of ASP.NET with many new features and capabilities. It’s clearly a different product than ASP.NET 4.6.
ASP.NET Core includes MVC and Web API and they all share one version. They are all part of ASP.NET Core 1.0.
What Happened to the Release Date?
Over the last few months, we have been working through taking the ideas that were in DNX and merging those with some of the ideas that the .NET team had around building native applications on .NET Core. We want to deliver a consistent toolchain for all .NET Core applications, and Scott Hanselman has a great post on his blog covering the .NET toolchain.
The ASP.NET team has maintained a roadmap and schedule on GitHub, and over the last week the dates for RC2 and RTM were updated to ‘TBD’ (to be determined) and folks were confused as to why this change was made.
We thought that by the end of January 2016 we would have DNX features and experiences implemented within and on top of NET Core and the new CLI. We realized, along with other folks on GitHub and Twitter that we don’t have all those bits working together yet and we knew that we would miss the date. In this past week’s Community Standup video, Scott, Damian and Jon talked through this schedule change. We also heard the community loud and clear say that they’d rather we slow down a bit and let these bits bake. We are.
We’ve heard consistent feedback on the change from DNX to CLI: “great change, but why so late?” We agree. This change is the primary reason for our schedule slip. It’s clear to us now that we were running too fast and didn’t take the time to fully think this one all the way through. We’re sorry about that, particularly to the early adopters that took a bet on DNX. We hope that you’ll continue to come along for the ride and adopt the changes in the Core platform.
The .NET and ASP.NET teams could have made up some new dates to publish, but they wouldn’t be as accurate as we feel we could deliver without further review of our current state and the new tools we want to be sure we deliver. As soon as we have the new ASP.NET and .NET Core tools working together we will update the roadmap with more appropriate dates for ASP.NET and the .NET team will update their roadmap with dates for .NET Core. The two teams are working hard on the framework and tools, and we hope to be able to revise the roadmap with a more accurate schedule in the next few weeks.
We anticipate that this will push the RTM schedule back, but not by much. We will continue to be transparent about the framework as we develop in the open. We’ll publish dates on the roadmap soon, but not before we – and you – can count on them.