It’s been a big year for server side web frameworks. Django 6 just dropped, Asp.net Core 10 came out a month ago, Rails 8.1 released in October and Laravel 12 came out in February.

After reviewing the options, I’ve decided to narrow down on Asp.net Core 10 for the following reasons.

Excellent tooling support (good vscode support out of the box with minimal configuration)

High quality documentation (both from Microsoft and 3rd party)

A polished story for async and background tasking built-in

Minimal APIs are ergonomic and refreshingly boiler plate free

Job availability

High performance of the .NET environment

F# for fun

Production quality migrations and ORM in EntityFramework

I love Django but there is something very hacky about building on Python. Elixir/Phoenix is the siren song always tantalising but even to this day it’s stuck in the past with primitive debugging (dbg and inspect) and I can’t live without a debugger.

Asp.net Core 10 lacks hot reload unfortunately but it does have a good debugger integration with vscode with zero setup. I must admit the nicest DX is found in typescript + bun + hono where both live reload and a working debugger make development a pure joy but you have to live with the chaos of the javascript ecosystem and the database story seems dubious with Prisma and Drizzle seems less mature.

For years I avoided anything Microsoft, I still have an unsettling feeling of setting up for disappointment, but I’ve persisted through the discomfort and I must admit with ASP.net Core 10, it’s as good as anything else out there and maybe even better overall.

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