It’s now a yearly thing for me to blog about my aspirations and plans for various OSS projects at the beginning of the year. I was mostly on the nose in 2018, and way, way off in 2019. I’m hoping and planning for a much bigger year in 2020 as I’ve gotten much more enthusiastic and energetic about some ongoing efforts recently.
Most of my time and ambition next year is going toward Jasper, Marten, and Storyteller:
Jasper
Jasper is a toolkit for common messaging scenarios between .Net applications with a robust in process command runner that can be used either with or without the messaging. Jasper wholeheartedly embraces the .Net Core 3.0 ecosystem rather than trying to be its own standalone framework.
Jasper has been gestating for years, I almost gave up on it completely early last year, and purposely set it aside until after .Net Core 3.0 was released. However, I came back to it a few months ago with fresh eyes and full of new ideas from doing a lot of messaging scenario work for Calavista clients. I’m very optimistic right now about Jasper from a purely technical perspective. I’m furiously updating documentation, building sample projects, and dealing with last minute API improvements in an effort to kick out the big v1.0 release sometime in January of 2020.
Marten
Marten is a library that allows .Net developers to treat the outstanding Postgresql database as both a document database and an event store. Marten is mostly supported by a core team, but I’m hoping to be much more involved again this year. The big thing is a proposed v4 release that looks like it’s mostly going to be focused on the event sourcing functionality. There’s an initial GitHub issue for the overall work here, and I want to write a bigger post soon on some ideas about the approach. There’s going to be some new functionality, but the general theme is to make the event sourcing be much more scalable. Marten is a team effort now, and there’s plenty of room for more contributors or collaborators.
For some synergy, I’m also planning on building out some reference applications that use Jasper to integrate Marten with cloud based queueing and load distribution for the asynchronous projection support. I’m excited about this work just to level up on my cloud computing skills.
Storyteller
Storyteller is a tool I’ve worked on and used for what I prefer to call executable specification in .Net (but other folks would call Behavior Driven Development, which I don’t like only because BDD is overloaded). I did quite a bit of preliminary work last year on a proposed Storyteller v6 that would bring it more squarely into the .Net Core world, I wrote a post last year called Spitballing the Future of Storyteller that laid out all my thoughts. I liked where it was heading, but I got distracted by other things.
For more synergy, Storyteller v6 will use Jasper a little bit for its communication between the user interface and the specification process. It also dovetails nicely with my need to update my Javascript UI skillset.
Smaller Projects
Lamar — the modern successor to StructureMap and ASP.Net Core compliant IoC container. I will be getting a medium sized maintenance release out very soon as I’ve let the issue list back up. I’m only focused on dealing with problems and questions as they come in.
EDIT 1/6/2020 –> There’s a Lamar 4.1 release out!
Alba — a library that wraps TestServer to make integration testing against ASP.Net Core HTTP endpoints easier. The big work late last year was making it support ASP.Net Core v3. I don’t have any plans to do much with it this year, but that could change quickly if I get to use it on a client project this year.
Oakton — yet another command line parser. It’s used by Jasper, Storyteller, and the Marten command line package. I feel like it’s basically done and said so last year, but I added some specific features for ASP.Net Core applications and might add more along those lines this year.
StructureMap — Same as last year. I answer questions here and there, but otherwise it’s finished/abandoned
FubuMVC — A fading memory, and I’m pleasantly surprised when someone mentions it to me about once or twice a year
The Shade Tree Developer 
I’m wondering – if Marten is going to extend it’s event sourcing functionality, what are your thoughts on breaking Marten into 2 Nuget packages, 1 for document DB, 1 for event sourcing?
My rationale is that using Marten as a document DB is a very common use case, while event sourcing is much more specialised.
We’ve talked about that quite a bit in the Gitter room. I think the consensus at the moment is to do that as part of v4. The event sourcing package would depend on the core Marten lib though.