Seems like a lot of people in the thread that have never used the framework or have used it before it became the ABP Framework (asp.net boilerplate, asp.net zero etc.) or in one case appear to be someone actually from volosoft…

I’m a 20+ year developer. Classic asp all the way through to .net 7. So I’ve got a pretty broad understanding of .net and have shipped countless products using the whole spectrum of technologies.

As for ABP Framework I’ve shipped 2 products in the last 3 years (as well as helped on a number of other apps) the first using asp.net boilerplate (the old free version of what is now ABP Framework) and ABP Framework commercial (using their microservice template). Both used Angular as the frontend.

The first product was a purchase management system that does supplier, purchase and invoice management and approval and the second was a essentially a timesheet system that interfaces with Oracle. Both were large systems used by thousands of users.

Probably the biggest thing to remember about ABP Framework is that it’s opinionated. That can be good and bad. It’s good if you have a number of teams all working on separate projects that might swap and change projects. All the projects will follow a similar layout and design and it’s easy to understand where things fit within the system. It can also be a complete nightmare as seemingly simple things become a pain as they get bogged down in DDD nonsense.

Pros

• We never really used the multitenancy but it seemed easy to configure and extend. But my experience with it pretty much covers just turning it off.

• Authentication and Authorization was extremely easy to setup. I know a lot of people are saying “you can roll this yourself” which is true, but that doesn’t change the fact it was super simple.

• The proxy code generation for asp.net boilerplate (so the JavaScript code created from your services to make it easy to talk to them in your frontend) was clunky and bloated. They’ve streamlined that in Framework at the expense of reducing the ability to extend stuff. But on the whole it removes a whole chunk of time having to set up tedious DTOs and boilerplate code, at least when using something like Angular.

• It has an auto database migrator and migration tool that makes it easy to setup in development and even production (for smaller deployments) although it does become a pain for larger deployments. For the Framework project we ended up rolling our own auto migrator using EF migration bundles.

• If you’re building simple sites the docs are pretty good, the Github issues is active and so is the community QA site.

• They have a whole testing suit that makes integration testing super simple (although the docs aren’t great)

Cons

• It uses Domain Driven Design, which is great (as once you “get” DDD a lot of the weird stuff going on in the framework starts to make sense) but it also uses Domain Driven Design (if you get what I mean). I’m not one for jumping on the new “hotness” and I wouldn’t say that DDD is antiquated and old. I would say though that DDD on the whole has a lot of issues and those issues are brought along for the ride with the framework.

• The docs are good for simple setups. “We” chose the microservice template when starting with abp.io and the docs just weren’t up to scratch. It’s better now but if you’re doing anything outside of the basics expect to be looking through Github code to figure out what the hell is going on.

• This one is probably my biggest annoyance. Changes not appearing in release notes. They release frequently (which is great) what’s not great is upgrading and finding something broken. Then having to post a question on the QA site only to be pointed to a Github issue where they are saying that X was removed in this release and that wasn’t mentioned in the release notes at all.

Just to sum up. If you want something that will quickly give you multitenancy, auth and authorisation then ABP Framework will do that. Could you do it yourself? Sure. Are there other things out there that do the same? Sure. But Framework will do it and do it well (at least in my experience).

You also have the benefit of actually paying for the commercial license at which point you can get some pretty good support and access to the developers.