ASP.NET Boilerplate is designed to help us to develop applications using best practices without repeating ourselves. DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself! is the key idea behind ASP.NET Boilerplate.
All applications have some common problems and need to some common structures. ASP.NET Boilerplate is proper from small applications to large enterprise web applications to accomplish fast startups and maintanable code bases.
Here, a list of concepts those are in mind while developing ASP.NET Boilerplate.
It should be easy to share entities, repositories, services and views between web applications. They should be packaged into modules and can be easily distributed (preferred as public/private nuget packages). Modules may depend on and use other modules. We should be able to extend models in a module for our application needs.
Modularity provides us "code re-usability" (DRY!). For example, we may develop a module that contains user management, role management, login page, error pages... Then all of these can be shared by our different applications.
An application should be developed by considering best practices in software development. Using dependency injection is one of the most important subjects in this area. Should use AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) where it's needed and possible, especially for cross-cutting concerns. It should correctly use architectural patterns such as MVC and MVVM. Also, it should follow the SOLID principles in whole application.
Following best practices makes our code-base more understandable and extensible. It also prevents us to fall in common mistakes those are experienced before by other people.
Architecture of an application should provide (even enforce) a way of keeping a maintainable code base. Layering and modularity are main techniques to accomplish that. Also, following best practices is important. Otherwise the application gets complicated when it grows. We know, there are many applications are re-written from zero just since it's too hard to maintain the code base (DRY!).
An application should use and combine useful libraries & frameworks to accomplish well-known tasks. Should not try to re-invent the whell if an existing tool meets it's requirements. It should concentrate to it's own job (to it's own business logic) as much as possible. For example, it may use EntityFramework or NHibernate for Object-Relational Mapping. May use AngularJs or DurandalJs as Single-Page Application framework.
Like or don't like it, today we need to learn many different tools to build an application. Even it's more complicated for client side. There are much more libraries (thousands of jQuery plug-ins for instance) and frameworks there. So, we should carefully choice libraries and adapt to our application.
ASP.NET Boilerplates composes and combines best tools for you while it preventing you from using your own favourite tools.
Authorization, validation, error handling, logging, caching... are common stuffs all applications implement in a some level. These codes should be generic and shared by different applications. It also should be seperated from business logic code and should be automated as much as possible. This allows us to more focus on our application specific business logic code and prevents us to re-think same stuff again and again (DRY!).
If it can be automated, it should be automated (at least in most case). Database migrations, unit tests, deployments are some of the tasks those can be automated. Automation saves our time in a long term (even in middle term) and prevents from mistakes of manual tasks (DRY!).
Convention over configuration is a very popular principle. An application framework should implement defaults as much as possible. It should be easier when following conventions but also should be configurable when needed.
It should be easy and fast to start a new application. We should not repeat some tedious steps to create an empty application (DRY!). Project/Solution templates is a proper way of doing it.
ASP.NET Boilerplate is an open source project developed under Github.
ASP.NET Boilerplate is designed and developed by Halil İbrahim Kalkan. There are also contributors on github. You can also fork repositories and send pull requests.
For your questions and other discussions, use official forum.
For feature requests or bug reports, use Github issues.
For personal contact with me, use my web page.