Long live Web Essentials

In an episode of .NET Rocks from December 2016 I declared that Web Essentials would not be carried forward to Visual Studio 2017 and beyond. I’ve decided that was a bad idea, released a version for Visual Studio 2017 and here’s why.

Since Web Essentials was first released for Visual Studio 2010 it has grown and grown in both features and complexity. While providing a lot of functionality it became somewhat of a monolith to maintain. The size of the project was enormous and that probably was one of the main reasons only very few people helped out by sending pull requests. Another problem was that when a bug would crash Visual Studio in a feature you never used, you had to uninstall the entire extension instead of just the part that crashed. That was very frustrating for the affected users.

About a year and a half ago, I started on splitting all the features out into their own smaller extensions. The goal was to break up Web Essentials into smaller chunks that would be easier to maintain, have better test coverage, be very targeted and – most importantly – optional. That goal has been achieved and I’ve already seen the benefits in terms of more community involvement and higher quality. I get a lot more pull requests to the individual extensions than I ever did with Web Essentials and I’ve even made people contributors to several of the projects that they have shown a vested interest in. Success!

The process of splitting out Web Essentials into smaller extensions have taken more than 18 months and is now finally done.

Web Extension Pack –> Web Essentials

Having 20+ extensions instead of one presents a new challenge. How to make sure that Web Essentials users could find and easily install all those extensions. Enter Web Extension Pack 2015. It is a meta extension that does nothing but install all the new extensions. It was a great way to just point people to a single extension that would take care of adding all the features relevant to web developers.

Now that I’m done separating all of Web Essentials into smaller features, it felt like Web Extension Pack was pretty much the same thing Web Essentials used to be. Namely a single download that would add a bunch of helpful web development related features.

So I had a few options. Either keep the name “Web Extension Pack” and forever lose the good name and brand “Web Essentials”, or rename the Web Extension Pack extension to Web Essentials. I’ve chosen to rename in order to keep the brand, logo and generally positive associations people have with the name “Web Essentials”.

Web Essentials lives on, but with smaller optional pieces, higher quality, more focused functionality, more community involvement, simpler code bases, and a lot more fun for me personally to maintain.

Web Essentials 2017

I just updated Web Extension Pack 2017 with the renaming and branding change to make it Web Essentials 2017. The brand and logo is alive again and hopefully for many years to come.

Thanks to everyone who ever downloaded Web Essentials or any other of the smaller extensions, left comments, ratings, opened issues and sent pull requests. Keep the feedback coming.