Marten 8.0, Wolverine 4.0, and even Lamar 15.0 are out!

It’s a pretty big “Critter Stack” community release day today, as:

1. Marten has its 8.0 release
2. Wolverine got a 4.0 release
3. Lamar, the spiritual successor to StructureMap, had a corresponding 15.0 release
4. And underneath those tools, the new JasperFx & JasperFx.Events library went 1.0 and the supporting Weasel library that provides some low level functionality went 8.0

Before getting into the highlights, let me start by thanking the Critter Stack Core team for all their support, contributions to both the code and documentation, and for being a constant sounding board for me and source of ideas and advice:

• Babu Annamalai
• Jaedyn Tonee
• Anne Erdtsieck
• Jakob Tikjøb Andersen
• Jeffry Gonzalez
• Erik Shafer

Next, I’d like to thank our Critter Stack community for all the interest and the continuous help we get with suggestions, pull requests that improve the tools, and especially for the folks who take the time to create actionable bug reports because that’s half the battle of getting problems fixed. And while there are plenty of days when I wish there wasn’t a veritable pack of raptors prowling around the projects probing for weaknesses in the projects, I cannot overstate the importance for an OSS project to have user and community feedback.

Alright, on to some highlights.

The big changes are that we consolidated several smaller shared libraries into one bigger shared JasperFx library and also combined some smaller libraries like Marten.CommandLine, Weasel.CommandLine, and Lamar.Diagnostics into Marten, Weasel, and Lamar respectfully. That’s hopefully going to help folks get to command line utilities quicker and easier, and the Critter Stack tools do get some value out of those command line utilities.

We’ve now got a shared model to configure behavioral differences at “Development” vs “Production” time for both Marten and Wolverine all at one time like this:

// These settings would apply to *both* Marten and Wolverine
// if you happen to be using both
builder.Services.CritterStackDefaults(x =>
{
    x.ServiceName = "MyService";
    x.TenantIdStyle = TenantIdStyle.ForceLowerCase;
    
    // You probably won't have to configure this often,
    // but if you do, this applies to both tools
    x.ApplicationAssembly = typeof(Program).Assembly;
    
    x.Production.GeneratedCodeMode = TypeLoadMode.Static;
    x.Production.ResourceAutoCreate = AutoCreate.None;

    // These are defaults, but showing for completeness
    x.Development.GeneratedCodeMode = TypeLoadMode.Dynamic;
    x.Development.ResourceAutoCreate = AutoCreate.CreateOrUpdate;
});

It might be awhile before this pays off for us, but everything from the last couple paragraphs is also meant to speed up the development of additional Event Sourcing “Critter” tools to expand beyond PostgreSQL — not that we’re even slightly backing off our investment in the do everything PostgreSQL database!

For Marten 8.0, we’ve done a lot to make projections easier to use with explicit code, and added a new Stream Compacting feature for yet more scalability.

For Wolverine 4.0, we’ve improved Wolverine’s ability to support modular monolith architectures that might utilize multiple Marten stores or EF Core DbContext services targeting the same database or even different databases. More on this soon.

Wolverine 4.0 also gets some big improvements for EF Core users with a new Multi-Tenancy with EF Core feature.

Both Wolverine and Marten got some streamlined Open Telemetry span naming changes that were suggested by Pascal Senn of ChiliCream who collaborates with JasperFx for a mutual client.

For both Wolverine and Lamar 15, we added a little more full support for the [FromKeyedService] and “keyed services” in the .NET Core DI abstractions like this for a Wolverine handler:

    // From a test, just showing that you *can* do this
    // *Not* saying you *should* do that very often
    public static void Handle(UseMultipleThings command, 
        [FromKeyedServices("Green")] IThing green,
        [FromKeyedServices("Red")] IThing red)
    {
        green.ShouldBeOfType<GreenThing>();
        red.ShouldBeOfType<RedThing>();
    }

And inside of Lamar itself, any dependency from a constructor function that has this:

// Lamar will inject the IThing w/ the key "Red" here
public record ThingUser([FromKeyedServices("Red")] IThing Thing);

Granted, Lamar already had its own version of keyed services and even an equivalent to the [FromKeyedService] attribute long before this was added to the .NET DI abstractions and ServiceProvider conforming container, but .NET is Microsoft’s world and lowly OSS projects pretty well have to conform to their abstractions sometimes.

Just for the record, StructureMap had an equivalent to keyed services in its first production release way back in 2004 back when David Fowler was probably in middle school making googly eyes at Rihanna.

What’s Next for the Critter Stack?

Honestly, I had to cut some corners on documentation to get the releases out for a JasperFx Software client, so I’ll be focused on that for most of this week. And of course, plenty of open issues and some outstanding pull requests didn’t make the release, so those hopefully get addressed in the next couple minor releases.

For the bigger picture, I think the rest of this year is:

1. “CritterWatch”, our long planned, not moving fast enough for my taste, management and observability console for both Marten and Wolverine.
2. Improvements to Marten’s performance and scalability for Event Sourcing. We did a lot in that regard last year throughout Marten 7.*, but there’s another series of ideas to increase the throughput even farther.
3. Wolverine is getting a lot of user contributions right now, and I expect that especially the asynchronous messaging support will continue to grow. I would like to see us add CosmosDb support to Wolverine by the end of the year. By and large, I would like to increase Wolverine’s community usage over all by trying to grow the tool beyond just folks already using Marten — but the Marten + Wolverine combination will hopefully continue to improve.
4. More Critters? We’re still talking about a SQL Server backed Event Store, with CosmosDb being a later alternative

Wrapping Up

As for the wisdom of ever again making a release cycle where the entire Critter Stack has a major release at the exact same time, this:

Finally, a lot of things didn’t make the release that folks wanted, heck that I wanted, but at some point it becomes expensive for a project to have a long running branch for “vNext” and you have to make the release. I’m hopeful that even though these major releases didn’t add a ton of new functionality that they set us up with the right foundation for where the tools go next.

I also know that folks will have plenty of questions and probably even inevitably run into problems or confusion with the new releases — especially until we can catch up on documentation — but I stole time from the family to get this stuff out this weekend and I’ll probably not be able to respond to anyone but JasperFx customers on Monday. Finally, in the meantime, right after every big push, I promise to start responding to whatever problems folks will have, but: