Starting a new project - .NET 5 Series, Part 2

Introduction

Welcome everyone to the second post in a series of posts about the upcoming releases of Optimizely .Net 5. In this post we will explore starting a new project.  Optimizely Content and Commerce clouds have always been relatively easy to setup a new project, and .Net 5 is no different.  Lets take a look at whats changed compared to full framework. 

Install Tools

When working with .Net 5, Microsoft provides tools to create and manage .Net 5 applications. These tools are actually .Net 5 applications themselves, which allow them to run on all operating systems.  In the full framework version, Optimizely relied on Visual Studio extensions and visual studio powershell to install new projects and update schema.  This of course will not work in .Net 5 because Visual Studio is not available on all the operating systems that can run .Net 5 applications.  

 dotnet new -i EPiServer.Net.Templates::1.0.0-pre-020039 --nuget-source https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/EpiserverEngineering/netCore/_packaging/beta-program/nuget/v3/index.json --force

 dotnet tool install EPiServer.Net.Cli --global --add-source https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/EpiserverEngineering/netCore/_packaging/beta-program/nuget/v3/index.json --version 1.0.0-pre-020034

(Note please use the beta feed for the preview packages until they are pushed to the normal Optimizely feed.)

Understanding the tools

The first tool we are installing are Optimizely project templates.  .Net 5 allows the developers the abiility to create a new project template using the dotnet new command.  There are many templates out there to help scaffold different types of .Net 5 applications.  For Optimizely, we provide empty cms and empty commerce projects.

The second tool is the Optimizely CLI tool.  This is a tool for creating database and database users as well as updating connection strings in appsettings.json.  It is important to note that this tool does not install any schema, it just creates the database and the user.  The schema is auto installed for the connection string if it does not find the schema it needs to run the application.

Creating the project

Lets create a new cms project.

dotnet new epicmsempty --name ProjectName
cd projectname
dotnet-episerver create-cms-database ProjectName.csproj -S . -E 
dotnet run

Now lets create a new commerce project.

dotnet new epicommerceempty --name ProjectName
cd projectname
dotnet-episerver create-cms-database ProjectName.csproj -S . -E
dotnet-episerver create-commerce-database ProjectName.csproj -S . -E --reuse-cms-user
dotnet run

Foundation

If you prefer to start with one of the foundation projects we have .Net 5 branches available.  These branches will move to develop once the software is General Availabiility.

Foundation

foundation-mvc-cms

Closing Thoughts

Getting started with a new Optimizely project is as easy as ever.  It is even easier for the non windows users who used to struggle with virtual machines to run the software locally.  With the cross plaform capabilities it is now possible to develop on your favored operating system.  In a future post we go a step further and explore how we leverage containers to run Optimizely.