Obsoleting Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices and Microsoft.AspNetCore.NodeServices

[danroth27]

ASP.NET Core supports integration with various single-page app (SPA) frameworks, including Angular, React, and React + Redux. Initially integration with these frameworks was accomplished with ASP.NET Core specific components that handled scenarios like server-side prerendering and integration with webpack. But as time went on, industry standards changed and the SPA frameworks each released their own standard command-line interfaces (e.g., Angular CLI, create-react-app).

When ASP.NET Core 2.1 was released in May 2018, we responded to the change in standards by providing a newer and simpler way to integrate with the SPA frameworks' own toolchains. This new integration mechanism exists in the package Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices.Extensions and remains the basis of our Angular and React project templates since ASP.NET Core 2.1.

To clarify that the older ASP.NET Core specific components are not relevant or recommended, we are now officially obsoleting the pre-2.1 integration mechanism and marking the supporting NPM packages as deprecated.

The contents of the following NuGet packages have all been unnecessary since ASP.NET Core 2.1, and so are now being marked as obsolete:

• Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices
• Microsoft.AspNetCore.NodeServices

For the same reason, the following NPM modules are being marked as deprecated:

• aspnet-angular
• aspnet-prerendering
• aspnet-webpack
• aspnet-webpack-react
• domain-task

These packages will later be removed in .NET 5. If you are using these packages, please update your apps to use the functionality in Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices.Extensions instead along with the functionality provided by the SPA frameworks you are using. To enable features like server-side prerendering and hot module reload please refer to the documentation for the corresponding SPA frameworks. The functionality in Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices.Extensions is not obsolete and will continue to be supported.

Discussion for this issue is at dotnet/aspnetcore#12890

This announcement has been migrated to dotnet/docs#14958