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Working with .Net Core & React - what I've learned

Alexandru-Dan Pop on October 09, 2020

I have been using both of those 2 awesome technologies for some time. From the point I started using React, I had a slow migration to the JS ecosys...
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John Peters

Now the .Net core ecosystem is obviously not as popular as the React ecosystem.

.NET is backend only, there's no comparison here other than popularity.

Lacks the advanced OSS tooling in the JS world - for more advanced linting, refactoring tools, code formatting you need to pay (ex for Resharper or Rider

Not true, Visual Studio is free! There no better IDE in the world than Visual Studio. For me I'd never touch ASP.NET Core using only VS Code.

The community is not so vibrant. And a lot of folks are not so open to sharing things. This ecosystem would have great success if people would be more open and share things more

In general a true statement, the ASP.NET world existed before open source and NPM, so there's not a lot of continuous chatter about it. ASP.NET is just a stable, constantly progressing state-of-the-art product. The amount of engineering behind it is massive. Plus it's one of Microsoft's only footholds (other than Typescript) into the web world. MSFT won't let it die and NODE backend isn't there yet popularity wise.

I wouldn't say the community is not vibrant as there's over 20 years of ASP.NET work which has gone on before now. That amounts to a huge community. Things just work so what's there to chatter about?

And a lot of folks are not so open to sharing things.

This is true, I recall when NPM showed up the world. At the time MSFT had their own concept an sites to do the same thing. It never amounted to much and finally they retired it, moving to GitHub concepts for C# stuff.

But even so, there was a silence among the C# crowd in my opinion and a lot of flamers on StackOverflow for C# questions. Many of the folks were just mean to new folks in my opinion. Even the experts were more prone to tell you how dumb your questions was because before answering they'd say things like "Why would you want to do that?". etc. etc.

Is it worth it today to be a PolyGlot? Absolutely, the only problem now is what languages do you want to know?

You may be surprised to know that the Java Spring community is huge. It surprised me. Even so, JQuery is still #1 according to S.O. dev survey this year. React is 2nd and Angular 3rd.

One thing is for sure, the industry is slow to catch up which gives us plenty of time to learn what we need to learn. Today if you know React and ASP.NET Core, you're safe.

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Alexandru-Dan Pop • Edited

Thanks for the excellent comment! Yes popularity wise I was not comparing it to React, but to other backend ecosystems out there. It is clearly very popular, but not as talked about and shared so much like as you said Java Spring, GO or Node. It's a pitty because as you said, ASP.NET Core is really a state of the art framework.

I also like Visual Studio + Resharper, and agree it's harder to code C# on VS Code - and I think this is exactly one of the huge problems. You should not depend on VS. You should have cross-platform, free tools that make DX excellent, not depend on VS that is not cross platform (yeah I'm aware of VS for mac).

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John Peters

I did some Java work 2 years ago after a 10 year hiatus. IntelliJ was good but not close to Visual Studio. Java Ides are still sick.

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Krystian

If you want cross-platform IDE I would say that Rider is the best and it is way faster than VS.

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Thanks Krystian, I did give it a try some time ago - maybe two or even more years. Will check it out again when I have some time. Would like it if VSCode could do all I need - React, TS, C#.

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TheOnlyBeardedBeast

In .net core you can have a multi project setup in a solution, so like a monorepo. Actually I do this combination for years now and I love it. React TS + .Net core with Code First Graphql (hotchocolatte)

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Yep definitely React with TS for the FE. Yep, you are right about the multi-project solution, but I think cli-wise you are limited, and tools like Lerna for example allow you to do more.

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TheOnlyBeardedBeast

You are able to handle a lot of things cli wise, but for sure it is not that good experince, using the full blown visualstudio is the real powerfull stuff here, lerna and yan workspaces are much better cli wise, true.

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Simanto Rahman

I've been using .NET for backend since .NET Core 1.1 and I agree. Once that learning curve with ASP.NET Core passes, it's a really powerful tool. Middlewares give more accessibility compared to something like NestJS. I rolled out my own set of middlewares for Identity rather than Microsoft Identity (which is an overkill for smaller projects). Proxy setups like Ocelot makes it easy to assemble complex micro servers that will ensure all your microservers are behind an authentication system. React + ASP.NET Core for FE + BE is THE perfect combo for me.

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Shaiju T

Now its more cool after the launch of .NET 5.0 , By the way you said "This ecosystem would have great success if people would be more open and share things more". I would like to know What the community should share ? Do you want how to tutorials like , how to deploy Asp.Net Core app or How to send Email etc ?

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Yep, more:

  • blogs
  • tutorials
  • libraries
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Killian Frappart

Hello Alexandru,
Are there any ressources you would recommend to learn C# and .Net Core for a beginner ?
Thank you very much!

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Start with C# first, Mosh has a nice video:

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Killian Frappart

Awesome 😇

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artydev • Edited

Hy,
Thanks
For managing state try the Meiosis pattern with whatever frameworks
Regards