Some Thoughts on MS Pulling Back on their “Eventing Framework”

I’ll admit that I’d stopped paying attention quite awhile ago and didn’t even realize Microsoft was still considering building out their own “Eventing Framework” until everybody and their little brother started posting a link to their announcement about forgoing this effort today.

Here’s a very few thoughts from me about this, and I think for about the first time ever, I’m disallowing comments on this one to just spit this out and be done with it.

• I thought that what they were proposing in terms of usability by basically trying to make it “Minimal API” for asynchronous messaging was not going to be very successful in complex systems. I get that their approach might have led to a low learning code for simple usage and there’s some appeal to having a common programming model with web development, but man, I think that would have severely limited that tooling in terms of what it helped you do to deal with application complexity or testability compared to existing tools in this space.
• Specifically, I think that the Microsoft tooling teams have a blind spot sometimes about testability design in their application frameworks
• I think this is a technical area where .NET is actually very rich in options and there’s actually a lot of existing innovation across our ecosystem already (Wolverine, NServiceBus, MassTransit, AkkaDotNet, Rebus, Brighter, Microsoft’s own Dapr for crying out loud). I did not believe that the proposed tooling from Microsoft in this case did anything to improve the ecosystem except for the inevitable folks who just don’t want to have any dependency on .NET technology that is not from Microsoft
• I’m continuously shocked anytime something like this bubbles up how a seemingly large part of the .NET community is outright hostile to non-Microsoft tooling in .NET
• I will 100% admit that I was concerned about my own Wolverine project being severely harmed by the MS offering at the same time believing quite fervently that Wolverine would long remain a far superior technical solution. The reality is that Microsoft tooling tends to quickly take the Oxygen out of the air for non-Microsoft tools regardless of relative quality or even suitability for real usage. You can absolutely compete with the Microsoft offerings on technical quality, but not in informational reach or community attention
• If Microsoft had gone ahead with their tooling, I had every intention of being aggressive online to try to point out every possible area where Wolverine had advantages and I had no plans to just give up. My thought was to just lean in much, much harder to the greater Critter Stack as a full blown Event Sourcing solution where there is really nothing competitive to the Critter Stack in the rest of the .NET community (I said what I said) and certainly nothing from Microsoft themselves (yet)
• I think it hurts the .NET ecosystem when Microsoft squelches community innovation and this is something I’ve never liked about the greater .NET community’s fixation on having official, Microsoft approved tooling.
• One thing the Microsoft folks tried to sell people like me who lead asynchronous messaging projects is that they (MS) were really good at application frameworks, and we could all take dependencies on a new set of medium level messaging abstractions and core libraries for messaging. I wonder if what they meant is what are now the various Aspire plugins for Rabbit MQ or Azure Service Bus. I was also extremely dubious about all of that.
• As someone else pointed out, do you really want one tool trying to be all things to all people because that’s a recipe for a bloated, unmaintainable tool
• I think the Microsoft team was a bit naive about what they would have to build out and how many feature requests they would have gotten from folks wanting to ditch very mature tools like MassTransit. I really don’t believe that Microsoft would have resisted the demands from some elements of the community to grow the new things into something able to handle more complex requirements
• I don’t know what to say about the people who flipped their lids over the MassTransit and MediatR commercialization plans. I think folks were drastically underestimating the value of those tools, the overhead in supporting those tools over time, and in complete denial about the practicality of rolling your own one off tools.
• The idea that Microsoft is an infallible maintainer of their development tools is bonkers
• Regardless, the Critter Stack is going down the “Open Core” model

As my mentor used to say at my first real software development job, I feel better now and thank you for listening.

And now, back to Wolverine 5 and CritterWatch for me…