What is NetForge
NetForge is an opinionated, feature-rich, AI-extensible starter template for ASP.NET Core 10 line-of-business applications, with your choice of a React 19 or Angular 22 frontend. It compresses the first 4–8 weeks of a typical SaaS or internal-tool project into a git clone — auth, roles and permissions, an admin console, a server-driven data grid, theming, internationalization, and a polished app shell are already wired and ready to extend.
Two things make it different:
- It looks like a 2026 product on first run. Every screen has designed loading, empty, and error states, full light/dark parity, mobile layouts, and keyboard navigation — treated as scope, not polish.
- It's built to be extended by an AI assistant. A uniform vertical-slice backend and a conventional frontend give an assistant exactly one shape to follow, so a whole feature can land from a single prompt. See Extend with AI.
- Pick your frontend. React 19 (Vite + shadcn/ui) or Angular 22 (Angular Material) — same backend, same quality bar, chosen with one flag at scaffold time. See React or Angular.
Who it's for
Developers building line-of-business apps — internal tools, admin panels, B2B SaaS, dashboards — who want a modern, opinionated foundation instead of assembling auth, RBAC, data tables, and theming from scratch. If you've reached for ABP Framework, a Clean-Architecture template, or a generic Visual Studio template and wanted something that already looks finished, NetForge is for you.
How it compares
| NetForge | ABP / Clean-Architecture templates | Generic VS template | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beautiful UI on first run | ✅ designed states, dark mode, mobile | ⚠️ functional, dated | ❌ bare |
| Opinionated, low-ceremony backend | ✅ minimal-API vertical slices | ❌ layers, MediatR, DDD ceremony | ⚠️ minimal but unstructured |
| AI-extensible by design | ✅ one shape, documented for agents | ❌ | ❌ |
| RBAC, audit, settings, dashboard included | ✅ | ⚠️ heavy modules | ❌ |
NetForge deliberately avoids MediatR/CQRS ceremony, AutoMapper, a repository layer over EF, and DDD aggregates. Minimal-API handlers are the handlers; mapping is plain static methods; you use DbContext directly.
What you get
- Architecture — vertical slices + reflection-based discovery, an
IEndpointFilterpipeline, RFC 7807 errors. - Auth & access — authentication (cookie/bearer, 2FA, OAuth, sessions) and authorization (roles + wildcard permissions).
- UI building blocks — a DataGrid, a form layer, and theming + i18n/RTL.
- Product features — search, audit, a widget dashboard, webhooks, notifications, and multi-tenancy.
- Production-readiness — rate limiting, health checks, API versioning, and a PWA.
Editions
NetForge ships as two editions from one codebase: Community (free, MIT) and Pro (commercial). A per-feature configurator scaffolds exactly the subsystems you want. See Community vs Pro.
Don't want to build it by hand?
Describe your app in plain language and AI builds it for you — with a real senior developer backing every build (free with every plan), so you're never on your own. Configure it yourself or let AI build it: either way you download a standard ASP.NET Core + React/Angular app you fully own — no proprietary runtime, no lock-in, host it anywhere.
Next steps
- Quick start — run it in one command.
- Project structure — find your way around.
- Architecture — the five ideas that hold it together.