Can ASP.NET Core gain traction like RoR or Node.js?

Having seen both sides of the spectrum, it’s really hard to say. From a technical perspective, ASP .Net Core does a lot of things right. It reduces the bloat of “legacy” .Net, makes things a bit more modular, and has a web server (Kestrel) whose core is also the core of Node. It’s finally cross-platform, has excellent tooling in the form of VS Code, and is measurably faster than Node on some metrics. Given all that, it’s a no-brainer that it should succeed, right? Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. Here’s my take on why it might struggle to find mass adoption like Node and RoR: The baggage of Microsoft. Yes, they have turned a over new leaf and Satya Nadella seems to “get it” with cloud and open source. However, you can’t just erase decades of questionable business practices (and, as a result, general mistrust of your company’s motives) just by open sourcing a few tools and “pulling a Ballmer” to try to woo developers. Though, in his defense, Ballmer seems to have softened his “Linux is a Cancer” stance. Because of yoga? Winning developer mindshare. Node, in particular, is extraordinary in this regard. When it came out, its non-blocking approach to concurrency was ingenious and blew developers’ minds, despite its warts. There have been numerous success stories from companies that deal with massive scale (Walmart, PayPal, Uber, to name a few). In developers’ eyes, Node is “battle tested” and has sort of become the de facto “glue” platform for everything, not just the go-to for massively scalable web servers and services. Espousing the value proposition for adoption. This is a bit unusual, as you would think that this would be a no-brainer for at least “legacy” .Net folks. However, from what I have seen, there seems to be no clean migration path from legacy .Net to .Net Core. This is understandable, as .Net Core can be almost treated as a separate branch of .Net entirely. .Net developers I’ve spoken to in the community seem committed to switching over. However, I did sense a bit of unease/uncertainty about their decision. I can only theorize a few reasons, but they could be: .Net Core is still very nascent and hasn’t been as “battle tested” as legacy .Net in developers’ eyes. There is still a massive ecosystem of tools specifically built for legacy .Net that now have to be ported over, in some fashion, to .Net Core. The big items from .Net are already in Core, but I’m sure there are 3rd party libraries on whom developers depend that still need to get with the program. The Node ecosystem is a bit more mature than .Net Core, which leads some devs to explore that path, since the migration from legacy .Net to .Net Core isn’t exactly an easy switchover. Node has hit the sweet spot of “fast enough”, developer mindshare, and wide adoption and support of its tooling in the cloud. Getting developers from that community, even .Net expats like myself, is going to be a hard sell to begin with. Having said all of that, I truly am rooting for .Net Core to find its footing and become a force for the Microsoft community and the FOSS community at large. It’s a revelation comparatively to legacy .Net, adopts a lot of great ideas from Node, and seems to take the best of “non-blocking I/O” with the “synchronous threaded” model we got so used to. Competitor frameworks will only breed the best for developers in the long-run, so go Redmond! I also hope that Microsoft’s attitude towards FOSS is genuine and not just a “bait-and-switch” that many of us fear. The strength of FOSS is the community and open-ness, and I, for one, am glad that Microsoft changed its draconian attitudes over the last few years and open sourced such great tools! read less