Good morning DevExpress team,
Microsoft has left bower out of its templates officially now for a while. Microsoft now goes with "libman.json", when clicking on the solution and selecting "Manage Client-side Libraries". This uses "cdnjs". My question is, do you intend to support this repository? The only thing I use bower for anymore, is the "devextreme-aspnet-data" library. The "devextreme" css and js libraries, I get from the installation. for those, I basically do a temporary install using a standard DevExtreme template, and get the js and css libraries from that (along with some of the layout setup code), then scrap the template and continue on in the project I'm working in. I would simply use the DevExtreme templates and that would be nice, but unfortunately those templates don't support individual user accounts, forcing me to use the Microsoft default netcore2.1 web template. It would also be nice to see that ASP.Net Pages (which has replaced MVC here for so many reasons) was used in the templates.
A couple key things to note:
- This new "libman.json" approach is the most ideal I've seen in the ecosystem, for a very long time. Bower was crazy-easy, but libman (using cdnjs) is every bit as easy, and much more solid.
- The only thing I use the bower file anymore for, is the "devextreme-aspnet-data" library. I would very much like to be able to retire Bower. I did go the route of using Yarn, but that is truly meant for scripted web development, and not functional UI (Visual Studio) development. I really wanted to like Yarn; I really did. However, as with evaluating ANY solution as a replacement to another, one must weigh it objectively. Yarn adds just too many steps, and too many ways to miss things. The ONLY thing it really has going for it, is speed, and the new solution is every bit as fast, if not faster. In contrast, "libman.json" is every bit as fast, thorough and efficient as bower, making it an ideal replacement. Microsoft clearly went the right direction. It is not meant as a full replacement of everything out there, but is meant to supply the core libraries just as bower did. "devextreme-aspnet-data" is a CORE library.
Question recap:
Will you support cdnjs with the core "devextreme-aspnet-data" client library, and if so, when?
Thank you,
Jason
I'll post my standard "libman.json" file contents in case anyone may need this as an excellent starting point. This is what I use in my projects, which is basically what Bower includes by default, plus the font-awesome library files. (I'll post and select 'C#' since 'JSON' is not a selection option)
{ "version": "1.0", "defaultProvider": "cdnjs", "libraries": [ { "library": "twitter-bootstrap@3.3.7", "destination": "wwwroot/lib/bootstrap", "files": [ "js/bootstrap.min.js", "css/bootstrap.min.css.map", "css/bootstrap.min.css", "fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.eot", "fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.svg", "fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.ttf", "fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff", "fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff2" ] }, { "library": "jquery@3.3.1", "destination": "wwwroot/lib/jquery", "files": [ "jquery.min.js", "jquery.min.map", "core.js" ] }, { "library": "jquery-validate@1.17.0", "destination": "wwwroot/lib/jquery-validation", "files": [ "jquery.validate.min.js" ] }, { "library": "jquery-validation-unobtrusive@3.2.10", "destination": "wwwroot/lib/jquery-validation-unobtrusive", "files": [ "jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js" ] }, { "library": "font-awesome@4.7.0", "destination": "wwwroot/lib/font-awesome", "files": [ "css/font-awesome.min.css", "css/font-awesome.css.map", "fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot", "fonts/fontawesome-webfont.svg", "fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf", "fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff", "fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2", "fonts/FontAwesome.otf" ] } ] }