The fine folks at DotNetRocks graciously allowed me to come on and talk about Wolverine and its combination with Marten into the new “Critter Stack” for highly productive server side development in .NET.
Wolverine is a new framework (but based on previous tools dating back over a decade) for server side .NET development that acts as both an in-process mediator tool and message bus for asynchronous messaging between processes. In an admittedly crowded field, Wolverine stands apart from older tools in a couple important ways:
- While Wolverine will happily take care of infrastructure concerns like error handling, logging, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, serialization, performance metrics, and interacting directly with message brokers, Wolverine does a much better job of keeping out of your application code
- Wolverine’s runtime model — including its robust middleware strategy — completely bypasses the performance problems the older tools incur
- Application code testability is a first class goal with Wolverine, and it shows. Unit testing is certainly easier with Wolverine keeping more infrastructure concerns out of your code, while also adding some unique test automation support for integration testing
- Developer productivity is enhanced by aiming for baking in infrastructure setup and configuration directly into Wolverine. And because some of Wolverine’s productivity boost admittedly comes from coding convention magic, Wolverine can tell you exactly what it’s going to do at runtime through its built in diagnostics.
The usage is already going to change next week based on a lot of early user feedback, but you can easily get the gist of what Wolverine is like in usage through the JetBrains webinar on Wolverine a couple weeks back:
The Shade Tree Developer 