Today we'd like to share with you our progress on migrating Cofoundry to support .NET Core and cross platform development scenarios. We're also pleased to announce pre-release NuGet packages and several sample projects to give you a flavor of how Cofoundry on .NET Core works.

What have we been up to

We had initially favored a two stage approach to migration with an initial port to ASP.NET Core running on the full .NET framework first, followed by a second release targeting .NET Core. However we found that the majority of the work and major changes were taking place in migrating to ASP.NET Core, and consequently the path to .NET Core was simpler than expected. Therefore instead of having two big breaking releases back to back we decided to push ahead with .NET Core support and put everything into a single release.

Work towards this release is being done in the release/0.2.0 branch and we're targeting .NET Standard 2.0 which runs on .NET Core 2.

What's available today

Pre-release packages for the 0.2 release are now available on our public MyGet pre-release feed, but because our documentation is still targeting the 0.1.x releases the best way to try out Cofoundry on .NET Core is to try out one of our sample projects in the release/net-core branch:

  • SimpleSite: A simple website implementing content management and some framework features
  • SPASite: An example demonstrating how to use Cofoundry to create a Single Page Application with REST api endpoints as well as demonstrating some advanced Cofoundry features.
  • PageBlockTypes A bare website showing various examples of how to implement a range of page block types.

We'll be working on updated documentation in the lead up to the final 0.2 release, so we'd encourage anyone that's looking for help to get in touch with us on our Gitter channel and we'll be happy to help.

What's next

The migration to .NET Core hasn't always been straightforward and ASP.NET Core in particular is significantly different. While some core concepts in Cofoundry such as dependency injection are now baked into the framework, other parts of the framework such as modular configuration have required a re-design.

We want to make sure we integrate as unobtrusively as possible into this new ASP.NET Core framework, so our next steps will be putting Cofoundry through it's paces and making sure we have the correct approach for all these features.

We'll also be doing a comprehensive review of our documentation and making updates to match all the changes. Remaining work for the release is tracked on GitHub under the 0.2 milestone .

We're also interesting in hearing your feedback so do get in touch if you're trying it out.