I was beginning to work on a new exploratory project where I wanted to get a little deeper into some technologies that I don’t get to use every day at work. I’ve got a plan to build a cloud-based web site that does a few things. So the choices were Angular or Aurelia on the front end and Node or ASP.Net 5/MVC 6 on the back end.
I’ve been doing various Node and Angular exercises and tutorials for the past year or so and have also been excited about the release of ASP.Net 5 and what it promises. Although I’ve been put off by the recent Node schism, I’m fully confident that either a reconciliation will take place or IO.js will run away with the ball. And the Node/IO community is so incredibly vibrant right now. It seems like there’s a package for anything/everything. You can literally see the energy coming off of that system. Recently, I’ve also been impressed by the Aurelia project and it’s embrace of ES 6 and other emerging and established standards. Aurelia will probably be a niche player in the SPA market when compared to Angular/React/Ember etc…, but it’s a really cool and looks well put together, so why not try it out.
But as cool as Node is, there are things that I’ll miss terribly in the .Net ecosystem like LINQ and (a hopefully more performant) EF and truly awesome productivity tools in VS and R# as well as all of my previous experience. I also want to support .Net’s move into OSS and embrace/trust its own community. Already the source code out on GitHub has been an incredible help to me. I think that’s already paying off.
I’ve decide to stick to my .Net roots and try out Asp.Net 5/MVC 6 as an API on the backend, trying to learn it while it’s still relatively new and attempt Aurelia on the front end with help from Bootstrap. We’ll see how it works out…
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