Anybody want a gently used StructureMap?

TL;DR – I’m getting burned out supporting StructureMap, but it’s still very heavily used and I’m really hoping to recruit some new blood to eventually take the project over from me.

I’ve been mulling over whether or not I want to continue development of StructureMap. At this point, I feel like the 3.0 and 4.0 releases dealt with all the major structural and performance problems that I could think of. If you ask me what I’d like to be do to improve one of my other OSS projects I could bend your ear for hours, but with StructureMap I’ve got nothing in mind.

The project is still very widely used (1.5M downloads from Nuget) and I don’t mean to just drop it by any means, but I’m wondering if anybody (hopefully plural) would like to take ownership over StructureMap and actually keep it advancing? I feel like the code is pretty clean, the test coverage is solid, and there’s even close to comprehensive documentation already published online.

Why I’ve lost enthusiasm:

  • I’ve worked on StructureMap since 2003
  • I’m mentally exhausted trying to stay on top of the user questions and problems that come rolling in and I’m starting to resent the obligation to try to help users unwind far out usages of the tool and dozens of disparate application frameworks.
  • There’s a consistent and vocal backlash against IoC containers in my Twitter feeds. To some degree, I think their experiences are just very different than my own and I don’t recognize the problems they describe in my own usage, but it still dampens enthusiasm.
  • I’ve got several other projects going that I’m frankly more passionate about right now (Marten, Storyteller, a couple others)
  • Microsoft has a small, built in IoC container as part of ASP.Net Core that I suspect will eventually wipe out all the myriad OSS IoC containers. I can point to plenty advantages of StructureMap over what’s built in, but most users probably wouldn’t really notice
  • At this point, with every application framework or service bus, folks are putting their IoC container behind an abstraction of some kind that tends to reduce StructureMap and other tools into the least common denominator functionality, so what’s the point of trying to do anything new if it’s gonna be thrown away behind a lame wrapping abstraction?
  • The ASP.Net Core compatibility has been a massive headache for me with StructureMap and I’m dreading the kinds of support questions that I expect to roll in from users developing with ASP.Net Core. More on this one later.

3 thoughts on “Anybody want a gently used StructureMap?

  1. I’ve used structuremap for years in pure .NET, but also integrated with Nancy, WebAPI, and MassTransit. Always been my IoC/DI container of choice. Thanks for all the work you’ve put in to this.

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