Introduction¶
ExtCore is free, open source and cross-platform framework for creating modular and extendable web applications based on ASP.NET Core. It is built using the best and the most modern tools and languages (Visual Studio 2019, C# etc). Join our team!
ExtCore allows you to build your web applications from the different independent reusable modules or extensions. Each of these modules or extensions may consist of one or more ASP.NET Core projects and each of these projects may include everything you want as any other ASP.NET Core project. You don’t need to perform any additional actions to make it all work: any ASP.NET Core project can be used as an ExtCore-based web application extension by default. Controllers, view components, views (precompiled), static content (added as resources) are resolved automatically. These projects may be then added to the web application in two ways: as direct dependencies (as source code or NuGet packages) or by copying compiled DLLs to the Extensions folder. ExtCore supports both of these options out of the box and at the same time.
Furthermore, any project of the ExtCore-based web application is able to discover the types that are defined inside all the projects (optionally using the predicates for assemblies filtering) and to get the implementations or instances of that types.
Any module or extension can execute its own code during the web application initialization and startup. You can use priorities to specify the correct order of the calls. This feature might be used for configuration, to register services etc.
ExtCore consists of two general packages and four optional basic extensions.
General Packages¶
ExtCore general packages are:
- ExtCore.Infrastructure;
- ExtCore.WebApplication.
ExtCore.Infrastructure¶
This package describes such basic shared things as IExtension interface and its abstract implementation –
ExtensionBase class. Also it contains ExtensionManager class – the central element in the ExtCore types
discovering mechanism. Most of the modules or extensions need this package as dependency in order to be able
to discover types, extensions etc.
ExtCore.WebApplication¶
This package describes basic web application behavior with Startup abstract class. This behavior includes
modules and extensions assemblies discovering, ExtensionManager initialization etc. Any ExtCore web
application must inherit its Startup class from ExtCore.WebApplication.Startup class in order to work
properly. Also this package contains IAssemblyProvider interface and its implementation –
AssemblyProvider class which is used to discover assemblies and might be replaced with the custom one.
Basic Extensions¶
ExtCore basic extensions are:
- ExtCore.FileStorage;
- ExtCore.Data;
- ExtCore.Mvc;
- ExtCore.Events.
ExtCore.FileStorage¶
This extension allows developer to work with a file storage through the abstraction layer and easily replace, let’s say, file system storage with the Dropbox or Azure Blob Storage ones without changing any code.
ExtCore.Data¶
By default, ExtCore doesn’t know anything about data, but you can use ExtCore.Data extension to have unified approach to working with data and the single data storage context among all the extensions. Data storage might be represented by a database, a web API, a file structure or anything else.
Currently ExtCore.Data supports MySQL, PostgreSql, SQLite, and SQL Server with Dapper or Entity Framework Core as ORM. You can add your own database or ORM support.
ExtCore.Mvc¶
By default, ExtCore web applications are not MVC ones. MVC support is provided for them by ExtCore.Mvc extension. This extension initializes MVC, makes it possible to use controllers, view components, views (added as resources and/or precompiled), static content (added as resources) from other extensions etc.
Also, it allows extension to register custom routes in a specific order.
ExtCore.Events¶
It can be used by the extension to notify the code in this or any other extension about some events.