I had kind of grown use to the fact that the bower.json file existed in all the brand new web based projects I would create in Visual Studio. So it was quite a surprise to hear that while Bower will be maintained, for now, they are officially recommending Yarn and Webpack going into the future, they even supply migration tips.
This frankly always the concern to me with any third party framework you decide to integrate into your larger project.
- What are the long term assurances you will have that the library/framework will exist into the future?
- Do you have access to the source code?
- Is there an option to pay for support?
- Do you want to be encumbered with creating your own version of that framework or plugin?
There are several third party packages that I have issue with for DasBlog-Core, the most concerning is Cook Computing XML-RPC. It appears to be feature complete (I am being generous) but with no visible changes or improvements in seven years. This does not fill me with confidence, but this package is still absolutely pivotal to me supporting tools like Open Live Writer.
Which brings me to the perpetual software engineering question, at what point do you just suck it up an create a file new project and write the code you want to see? Thankfully with the introduction of the .NET Standard 2 I get to put off many of those decisions because many of the plugins and frameworks get to live on in .NET Core.
Microsoft appears to have reached that tipping point, and while they could certainly swap out Bower for Yarn, they have taken the alternate route of creating a new client-side content manager for web apps called Library Manager, Lib Man. Here is Mads Kristensen talking about the tool in its nascent form last year:
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