My bandwidth for OSS work has been about zero for the past couple months. With the COVID-19 measures drastically reducing my commute and driving kids to school time, getting to actually use some of my projects at work, and a threat from an early adopter to give up on Jasper if I didn’t get something out soon, I suddenly went active again and got quite a bit of backlog things, pull requests, and bug fixes out.
My main focus in terms of OSS development for the past 3-4 years has been a big project called “Jasper” that was originally going to be a modernized .Net Core successor to FubuMVC. Just by way of explanation, Jasper, MO is my ancestral hometown and all the other projects I’m mentioning here are named after either other small towns or landmarks around the titular “Jasper.”
Alba
Alba is a library for HTTP contract testing with ASP.Net Core endpoints. It does quite a bit to reduce the repetitive code from using TestServer by itself in tests and makes your tests be much more declarative and intention revealing. Alba v3.1.1 was released a couple weeks ago to address a problem exposing the application’s IServiceProvider from the Alba SystemUnderTest. Fortunately for once, I caught this one myself while dogfooding Alba on a project at work.
Alba originated with the code we used to test FubuMVC HTTP behavior back in the day, but was modernized to work with ASP.Net Core instead of OWIN, and later retrofitted to just use TestServer under the covers.
Baseline
Baseline is a grab bag of utility code and extension methods on common .Net types that you can’t believe is missing from the BCL, most of which is originally descended from FubuCore.
As an ancillary project, I ripped out the type scanning and assembly finding code from Lamar into a separate BaselineTypeDiscovery Nuget that’s used by most of the other libraries in this post. There was a pretty significant pull request in the latest BaselineTypeDiscovery v1.1.0 release that should improve the application start up time for folks that use Lamar to discover assemblies in their application.
Oakton
Oakton is a command parsing library for .Net that was lifted originally from FubuCore that is used by Jasper. Oakton v2.0.4 and Oakton.AspNetCore v2.1.3 just upgrade the assembly discovery features to use the newer BaselineTypeDiscovery release above.
Lamar
Lamar is a modern, fast, ASP.Net Core compliant IoC container and the successor to StructureMap. I let a pretty good backlog of issues and pull requests amass, so I took some time yesterday to burn that down and the result is Lamar v4.2. This release upgrades the type scanning, fixes some bugs, and added quite a few fixes to the documentation website.
Jasper
Jasper at this point is a command executor ala MediatR (but much more ambitious) and a lightweight messaging framework — but the external messaging will mature much more in subsequent releases.
This feels remarkably anti-climactic seeing as how it’s been my main focus for years, but I pushed Jasper v1.0 today, specifically for some early adopters. The documentation is updated here. There’s also an up to date repository of samples that should grow. I’ll make a much bigger deal out of Jasper when I make the v1.1 or v2.0 release sometime after the Coronavirus has receded and my bandwidth slash ambition level is higher. For right now I’m just wanting to get some feedback from early users and let them beat it up.
Marten
There’s nothing new to say from me about Marten here except that my focus on Jasper has kept me from contributing too much to Marten. With Jasper v1.0 out, I’ll shortly (and finally) turn my attention to helping with the long planned Marten v4 release. For a little bit of synergy, part of my plans there is to use Jasper for some of the advanced Marten event store functionality we’re planning.
The Shade Tree Developer 