Is it too early to start an ASP.NET 5 web project?

Question

We are about to begin development on a completely new web application. It's a big project and will take years to finish and will probably have quite a long lifetime.

Since ASP.NET 5 is just around the corner, but still in BETA - is it too early to start a web project using the new ASP.NET version?

I can understand that we might have to face a few tricky upgrades before it hits Beta8 and RC, but the benefits of using it right away might beat the costs of upgrading later (or never).

What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

We were facing the same 'problem' as you describe at my company. We have a complex Web Forms application that has been around for almost 10 years which is in desperate need of a rewrite. We chose to start off using the ASP.NET 5 stack.

When you start such a new and big project, the first months will probably be used for prototyping and creating a proof of concept. In my opinion using a framework which is in beta at that phase of development, is just fine.

If we look at the roadmap, beta7 will be shipped this or next week and beta8 will probably be the last release with new features. This means that the days of major breaking API changes and package renames are mostly behind us.

I started prototyping on our new application since beta3. This caused some headaches when upgrading to a new beta, but the plus side on it is that I got to know the framework really well and watched the changes pretty close on the GitHub repositories. I actually proposed some PRs of things I missed during developing my application.

There are some downsides though. As I mentioned above, new betas might break (or even remove) functionalities you just implemented. Another pain is the lack of documentation, yet they are making good progress at http://docs.asp.net/.

You could start using the current stable ASP.NET 4 / MVC 5 stack, but you probably have to start over when ASP.NET 5 gets a go-live status and you want to use that.

So my conclusion is that you're probably just fine when you start using ASP.NET 5. Although it's not production ready yet, your application isn't either. By the time your product goes live, ASP.NET 5 is probably at RC or even at v1.0.