Are there plans for DXA .NET on ASP.NET Core?

Question

Currently the DXA .NET Framework is targetting .NET Framework 4.5.2. Are there any plans to move to ASP.NET Core? (not to confuse wit .NET Core)

The current prerequisites for DXA, being .NET 4.5.2, would allow to use ASP.NET Core with today's available technology.

ASP.NET Core has quite a few nice advantages such as improved exception handling, DI out of the box, smaller footprint, merged with WEB.API, and I guess more ;)

The would be a backwards compatibility break with web applications built on existing DXA versions of course.

Answer 1

The answer is yes, DXA does have plans to move to .NET Core, in line with the plans for SDL Web to move its APIs to .NET Core. These plans actually date back to February 2016 back when .NET Core 1.0 wasn't even released yet.

It seemed at that time we needed to wait for the CIL to be changed to be .NET Core compatible first, and then following that have DD4T add .NET Core support before we could change DXA to be .NET Core compatible, which is why I havn;t mentioned anything of these plans before.

Another change which looked to be flowing from the move to .NET Core seemed to be the changes in MVC 6, which would not allow our current structure of Page Controller and Region and Entity sub-controllers anymore, making the move to .NET Core a high impact breaking change.

It seems there has lately been some more clarity on ASP.NET Core and .NET Framework 4.6 (or .NET Core), which means that we could move DXA to .NET Core without needing to wait for CIL or make the high impact changes.

Currently the DXA team is busy with the DD4T & DXA merge, something which will introduce quite a few changes, that I still need to communicate to a broader audience (you will hear of it soon). I'll make sure the discussion around .NET Core support will be taken into account in this, and if it doesn't have too much impact, that it will be done as soon as possible.

Update

Here are the first two updates on the DD4T & DXA merge I promised:

https://community.sdl.com/solutions/content-management/tridion/tridion-developer/b/weblog/posts/update-on-the-dd4t-and-dxa-merge

https://community.sdl.com/solutions/content-management/tridion/tridion-developer/b/weblog/posts/dxa-2-0-architecture

Answer 2

Statement from the DD4T project website:

For the past 3 years, the development of DD4T was put on hold while we worked with SDL to merge our framework with SDL's own Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA). This merger was not as successful as we had hoped. We have therefore resumed active development of DD4T. This has resulted in the release of DD4T 2.5 for Microsoft .NET, on Dec 30, 2019.

For the many organizations using DD4T, it will be comforting to know that DD4T will continue to be a solid foundation on which to build your web applications. The community will continue to support you. Bugs will be fixed, stability will be improved and performance will be enhanced. Compatibility with Tridion and .NET is guaranteed, and technical trends will be followed.