How do I structure and maintain a large ASP.Net Core C# Application once it is in Production?

Question

Having used a lot of scripting languages, it's pretty simple to make a change. No compilation necessary.

But now I have an ASP.Net C# application. It's small, so I can learn from it, but how do I make changes when they are small? For example, say I need to add a column to the API. I forgot one.

What do I do? The application is one DLL. I can add it and create the site and get away with it because it is a small application.

What if it is an entire Intranet? Lots of things going on. How do I structure this and maintain it?

If I have an HR, Board, Committee, Management, etc., are they all different DLLs, all different ASP.Net Visual Studio projects? It gets even more complex if I use Razor (I think) because I should probably use VS for that front end as well.

What do I do when I make changes? Is this what Continuous Integration is for?

I have read this, but I'm not sure it answers my question.

• Robert Harvey: You should check out orchardproject.net. Orchard has a reputation for being very well organized.
• johnny: Actually, I have been doing that. I read that somewhere else on SO.

Answer 1

Well, mainly, it depends on how large you're.

If you're aiming for medium-large (peaks to 500 concurrent users give or take), i would tell you to go micro-services instead of a monolith. Check out DDD, and other project organization strucutures...

But, answering your questions directly, when you make a change on your code, you have to redeploy, which, yes, means opening up the server somehow and replacing the dll and running a IISRestart... There are tools to help you do that.

Continuous integration covers that, but the tools you're looking for here is continuous deployment tools, where, for example, upon committing/checking-in the tools (such as TFS, or GIT+Jenkins, or others) will compile your code, run your tests, do whatever else you want, and then deploy your code to production all-at-once or piece-by-piece...

The main thing is that there is no right or wrong here. There are solutions/techniques that best fit your needs or not...

• johnny: My problem with Microservices are transactions and data-integrity. I will look at the other things you mentioned. Thanks.
• Leonardo: @johnny data-integrity is indeed a problem, but transactions should not be. It's not ideal but WCF/MSMQ accepts "TransactionScope" for example... the better option here is to not have transactions at all