Updating My ASP.NET Core Template to .NET Core 3.1
Back in 2016, I decided to build an ASP.NET Core template app so I could play with the framework and get a feel for working with .NET Core. It turned out to be a fun process but took a long time! Admittedly, I took it further than I initially planned to, by adding email functionality, scaffolding tests, building in database migrations, provisioning / deployment with Ansible, and much more. I learned a lot.
It became helpful to some others, to my joy. I got some contributions, questions, and some link backs to my repository as a reference. That type of interest and involvement in the open-source community is really what makes it fun and gives me encouragement to keep contributing.
Back in September, Victor Cardins asked if I planned to upgrade the template to .NET 3.0. It had been awhile since I worked with this project and the idea seemed to be too much to tackle with all the other things I was juggling at the time. But I had some spare time last week, and a burst of interest, so I decided to take the plunge. It took longer than I thought it would (of course) but I finally finished it. This upgrade was certainly rougher than than the upgrade from 2.0. to 2.1 as quite a few foundational APIs have changed. By far the biggest change was the deprecation of Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices because I had to restructure how Webpack was integrated for on-demand bundling and HMR.