JasperFx OSS Plans for .Net 6 (Marten et al)

I’m going to have to admit that I got caught flat footed by the .Net 6 release a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t really been paying much attention to the forthcoming changes, maybe got cocky by how easy the transition from netcoreapp3.1 to .Net 5 was, and have been unpleasantly surprised by how much work it’s going to take to move some OSS projects up to .Net 6. All at the same time that the advance users of the world are clamoring for all their dependencies to target .Net 6 yesterday.

All that being said, here’s my running list of plans to get the projects in the JasperFx GitHub organization successfully targeting .Net 6. I’ll make edits to this page as things get published to Nuget.

Baseline

Baseline is a grab bag utility library full of extension methods that I’ve relied on for years. Nobody uses it directly per se, but it’s a dependency of just about every other project in the organization, so it went first with the 3.2.2 release adding a .Net 6 target. No code changes were necessary other than adding .Net 6 to the CI testing. Easy money.

Oakton

EDIT: Oakton v4.0 is up on Nuget. WebApplication is supported, but you can’t override configuration in commands with this model like you can w/ HostBuilder only. I’ll do a follow up at some point to fill in this gap.

Oakton is a tool to add extensible command line options to .Net applications based on the HostBuilder model. Oakton is my problem child right now because it’s a dependency in several other projects and its current model does not play nicely with the new WebApplicationBuilder approach for configuring .Net 6 applications. I’d also like to get the Oakton documentation website moved to the VitePress + MarkdownSnippets model we’re using now for Marten and some of the other JasperFx projects. I think I’ll take a shortcut here and publish the Nuget and let the documentation catch up later.

Alba

Alba is an automated testing helper for ASP.Net Core. Just like Oakton, Alba worked very well with the HostBuilder model, but was thrown for a loop with the new WebApplicationBuilder configuration model that’s the mechanism for using the new Minimal API (*cough* inevitable Sinatra copy *cough*) model. Fortunately though, Hawxy came through with a big pull request to make Alba finally work with the WebApplicationFactory model that can accommodate the new WebApplicationBuilder model, so we’re back in business soon. Alba 5.1 will be published soon with that work after some documentation updates and hopefully some testing with the Oakton + WebApplicationBuilder + Alba model.

EDIT: Alba 7.0 is up with the necessary changes, but the docs will come later this week

Lamar

Lamar is an IoC/DI container and the modern successor to StructureMap. The biggest issue with Lamar on v6 was Nuget dependencies on the IServiceCollection model, plus needing some extra implementation to light up the implied service model of Minimal APIs. All the current unit tests and even integration tests with ASP.Net Core are passing on .Net 6. To finish up a new Lamar 7.0 release is:

• One .Net 6 related bug in the diagnostics
• Better Minimal API support
• Upgrade Oakton & Baseline dependencies in some of the Lamar projects
• Documentation updates for the new IAsyncDisposable support and usage with WebApplicationBuilder with or without Minimal API usage

EDIT: Lamar 7.0 is up on Nuget with .Net 6 support

Marten/Weasel

We just made the gigantic V4 release a couple months ago knowing that we’d have to follow up quickly with a V5 release with a few breaking changes to accommodate .Net 6 and the latest version of Npgsql. We are having to make a full point release, so that opens the door for other breaking changes that didn’t make it into V4 (don’t worry, I think shifting from V4 to V5 will be easy for most people). The other Marten core team members have been doing most of the work for this so far, but I’m going to jump into the fray later this week to do some last minute changes:

• Review some internal changes to Npgsql that might have performance impacts on Marten
• Consider adding an event streaming model within the new V4 async daemon. For folks that wanna use that to publish events to some kind of transport (Kafka? Some kind of queue?) with strict ordering. This won’t be much yet, but it keeps coming up so we might as well consider it.
• Multi-tenancy through multiple databases. It keeps coming up, and potentially causes breaking API changes, so we’re at least going to explore it

I’m trying not to slow down the Marten V5 release with .Net 6 support for too long, so this is all either happening really fast or not at all. I’ll blog more later this week about multi-tenancy & Marten.

Weasel is a spin off library from Marten for database change detection and ADO.Net helpers that are reused in other projects now. It will be published simultaneously with Marten.

Jasper

Oh man, I’d love, love, love to have Jasper 2.0 done by early January so that it’ll be available for usage at my company on some upcoming work. This work is on hold while I deal with the other projects, my actual day job, and family and stuff.