Update on Jasper v2 with an actual alpha

First off, my super power (stop laughing at me!) is having a much longer attention span than the average software developer. In positive ways, this has enabled me to tackle very complex problems. In negative ways, I’ve probably wasted a tremendous amount of time in my career working on systems or projects long after they had probably already failed and I just wouldn’t admit it.

So late last year I started working on a reboot of Jasper, my attempt at creating a “next generation” messaging framework for .Net. The goal of Jasper has changed quite a bit since I started jotting down notes for it in 2014, but the current vision is to be a highly productive command execution engine and asynchronous messaging tool for .Net with less code ceremony than the currently popular tools in this space.

I kicked out a Jasper v 2.0.0-alpha-1 release this week just barely in time for my talk at That Conference yesterday (but didn’t end up showing it at all). Right now the intermediate goals to get to a full Jasper 2.0 rebooted project is to:

• Finish the baked in Open Telemetry support. It’s there, but there’s holes in what’s being captured
• Get the interop with MassTransit via Rabbit MQ working for more scenarios. I’ve got a successful proof of concept of bi-directional interaction between Jasper and MassTransit services
• Finish documentation for the new 2.0 version. I moved the docs to VitePress and started re-writing the docs from scratch, and that takes time

The first two bullet points are all about getting Jasper ready to be something I could dogfood at work.

While I absolutely intend both Jasper and Marten to be perfectly usable without the other, there’s also going to be some specific integration between Jasper and Marten to create a full blown, opinionated CQRS stack for .Net development (think Axon for .Net, but hopefully with much less code ceremony). For this combination, the Marten team is talking about adding messaging subscriptions for the Marten event store functionality, Jasper middleware to reduce repetitive CQRS handler code, and using the outbox functionality in Jasper to also integrate Marten with external messaging infrastructure.

I’ll kick out actual content about all this in the next couple weeks, but a couple folks have noticed the big uptick in Jasper work and asked what was going on, so here’s a little blog post on it:)