Critter Stack Roadmap for 2025

A belated Happy New Year’s to everybody!

The “Critter Stack” had a huge 2024, and I listed off some of the highlights of the improvements we made in Critter Stack Year in Review for 2024. For 2025, we’ve reordered our priority order from what I was writing last summer. I think we might genuinely focus more on sample applications, tutorials, and videos early this year than we do on coding new features.

There’s also a separate post on JasperFx Software in 2025. Please do remember that JasperFx Software is available for either ongoing support contracts for Marten and/or Wolverine and consulting engagements to help you wring the most possible value out of the tools — or to just help you with any old server side .NET architecture you have.

Marten

At this point, I believe that Marten is by far and away the most robust and most productive tooling for Event Sourcing in the .NET ecosystem. Moreover, if you believe Nuget download numbers, it’s also the most heavily used Event Sourcing tooling in .NET. I think most of the potential growth for Marten this year will simply be a result of developers hopefully being more open to using Event Sourcing as that technique becomes better known. I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but my feeling is that Marten’s main competitor is shops choosing to roll their own Event Sourcing frameworks in house rather than any other specific tool.

• I think we’re putting off the planned Marten 8.0 release for now. Instead, we’ll mostly be focused on dealing with whatever issues come up from our users and JasperFx clients with Marten 7 for the time being.
• Babu is working on adding a formal “Crypto Shredding” feature to Marten 7
• More sample applications and matching tutorials for Marten
• Possibly adding a “Marten Events to EF Core” projection model?
• Formal support for PostgreSQL PostGIS spatial data? I don’t know what that means yet though
• When we’re able to reconsider Marten 8 this year, that will include:
  • A reorganization of the JasperFx building blocks to remove duplication between Marten, Wolverine, and other tools
  • Stream-lining the Projection API
  • Yet more scalability and performance improvements to the async daemon. There’s some potential features that we’re discussing with JasperFx clients that might drive this work

After the insane pace of Marten changes we made last year, I see Marten development and the torrid pace of releases (hopefully) slowing quite a bit in 2025.

Wolverine

Wolverine doesn’t yet have anywhere near the usage of Marten and exists in a much more crowded tooling space to boot. I’m hopeful that we can greatly increase Wolverine usage in 2025 by further differentiating it from its competitor tools by focusing on how Wolverine allows teams to write backend systems with much lower ceremony code without sacrificing testability, robustness, or maintainability.

We’re shelving any thoughts about a Wolverine 4.0 release early this year, but that’s opened the flood gates for planned enhancements to Wolverine 3.*:

• Wolverine 3.6 is heavily in flight for release this month, and will be a pretty large release bringing some needed improvements for Wolverine within “Modular Monolith” usage, yet more special sauce for lower “Vertical Slice Architecture” usage, enhancements to the “aggregate handler workflow” integration with Marten, and improved EF Core integration
• Multi-Tenancy support for EF Core in line with what Wolverine can already do with its Marten integration
• CosmosDb integration for Transactional Inbox/Outbox support, saga storage, transactional middleware
• More options for runtime message routing
• Authoring more sample applications to show off how Wolverine allows for a different coding model than other messaging or mediator or HTTP endpoint tools

I think there’s a lot of untapped potential for Wolverine, and I’ll personally be focused on growing its usage in the community this year. I’m hoping the better EF Core integration, having more database options, and maybe even yet more messaging options can help us grow.

I honestly don’t know what is going to happen with Wolverine & Aspire. Aspire doesn’t really play nicely with frameworks like Wolverine right now, and I think it would take custom Wolverine/Aspire adapter libraries to get a truly good experience. My strong preference right now is to just use Docker Compose for local development, but it’s Microsoft’s world and folks like me building OSS tools just have to live in it.

Ermine & Other New Critters

Sigh, “Ermine” is the code name for a long planned port of Marten’s event sourcing functionality to Sql Server. I would still love to see this happen in 2025, but it’s going to be pushed off for a little bit. With plenty of input from other Marten contributors, I’ve done some preliminary work trying to centralize plenty of Marten’s event sourcing internals to a potentially shared assembly.

We’ve also at least considered extending Marten’s style of event sourcing to other databases, with CosmosDb, RavenDb, DynamoDb, SqlLite, and Oracle (people still use it apparently) being kicked around as options.

“Critter Watch”

This is really a JasperFx Software initiative to create a commercial tool that will be a dedicated management portal and performance monitoring tool (meant to be used in conjunction with Grafana/Prometheus/et al) for the “Critter Stack”. I’ll share concrete details of this when there are some, but Babu & I plan to be working in earnest on “Critter Watch” in the 1st quarter.

Note about Blogging

I’m planning to blog much less in the coming year and focus more on either writing more robust tutorials or samples within technical documentation sites and finally joining the modern world and moving to YouTube or Twitch video content creation.