Preparing for dotnet cli

by Shayne Boyer

There was a ton of cool that came out of the Connect()(http://connect2015.visualstudio.com/) event. For me the announcement of ASP.NET 5 going RC was a great milestone.

  • Go Live License with support
  • Linux, Windows, OS X
  • Installers available - http://get.asp.net

Checkout Cleanshave available on GitHub an ASP.NET 5 & Angular 2 template called .

There were a bunch of other items announced such as open sourcing Visual Studio Code (http://github.com/microsoft/vscode) and showing off Glimpse.

What's Next

One of the things shown was the dotnet cli. This is the next iteration of the command line tooling for .NET. Currently we are typing dnx run for console applications or dnx web for web apps. The dnu restore command is used to download and install the packages from nuget. And there are a list of other commands related to dnx,dnu.

In the next release, RC2, slated for sometime in Q1 2016. The commands will be reduced to:

dotnet run
dotnet compile
dotnet pack
dotnet restore
dotnet publish

Notice that consistency with the actual command name dotnet? If you have been in other technologies like node.js, ruby or python; the cli is similar on that platform. Typing node [arg] or python [arg].

In the interest of getting the fingers ready, I created a simple function/alias for the current common dnx,dnu commands and mapped them to the new dotnet command for my OS X dev machine.

I added this to my ~/.bashrc and now to run my ASP.NET 5 web apps I can type dotnet restore and dotnet run.

### dnvm list ...
### dnx web -> dotnet run
### dnx run -> dotnet run
### dnu publish -> dotnet publish
### dnu build -> dotnet compile
### dnu restore -> dotnet restore
### dnu install -> dotnet install

function dotnet() {
     local c=$1;
     local args=$2;
     local opt=$3

case $c in
'run')      dnx web
            ;;
'publish')  dnu publish $args $opt
            ;;
'compile') dnu build $args $opt
           ;;
'restore') dnu restore
           ;;
'install') dnu install $args $opt
           ;;
'list')    dnvm list
           ;;
 esac
}

Summary

Of course, some of this is subject to change. And the dnx and dnu commands are still valid and operable. Feel free to share.

Scott Hanselman Summary of Connect() - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ASPNET5AndNETCoreRC1InContextPlusAllTheConnect2015News.aspx