Meet the .Net Core Early Adapters

In this post Tim Thomas from NetPotential, a small but mighty web dev agency, shares a 9-month project of theirs using vNext, or as it's now known - ASP.NET Core! Here's Tim's summary.

"Black Market, NZ's largest online retailer of wine, has been running on Microsoft technology since its inception in 1999. First built on Classic ASP, rebuilt on .NET in 2010 and now rebuilt May 2016 on .NET Core."

"We began the rebuild in August 2015, the foundation and technology for the new site would need to last the next 5-8 years. With .NET Core being just around the corner we didn't want to build on .NET MVC 5, and have to rebuild, refactor and retest when .NET Core was released."

"The team at NetPotential weighed up the pros, cons, and risks of being early adopters of Microsoft's new cross-platform development toolset and decided to take the plunge. The new site was started on the beta 6 version of Core. Development was expected to take 6-9 months, and the roadmap would put it on RC2 before launch."

"With such new technology, the biggest risk and challenge was that there was no documentation, code samples, and little community support for Core. The fact that it was open-source, and we could debug the framework really helped get us through. We were constantly looking at the source code to see how things worked. We found and reported several bugs in the framework during development. The Microsoft .NET Core team were very helpful and quick to respond to our questions and bug reports, which was awesome."

"With hundreds of orders being placed on Black Market every day, downtime during the upgrade was not an option. Black Market was successfully re-launched on 10 May on RC1, and will be soon upgraded to run on 1.0, once it's released."

"The team learnt so much during this project and are proud to launch what is probably the largest site in NZ running on the latest MS technology stack. Check out the site in action at www.blackmarket.co.nz".