Jeff Makes Software

Last week I published the release for POP Forums v15.0.3, the forum application that runs on ASP.NET Core. The supporting documentation is in solid shape as well, including information on using it all by way of package references. Check the wiki for that information.

That's weird. I haven't made a post here in more than two years. Kind of lame, right? I got out of the habit because it took me years through the betas and changes to port POP Forums to Core, and I'm in that career stage where I've been bouncing in and out of writing code. I don't write any at all for work now, which gives me more of that flavor of mental bandwidth for it now. Because of that, I've made more than a hundred commits to POP Forums the last few months. It's an actual thing, and even gets a PR now and then.

I started to work on migrating POP Forums to the new ASP.NET Core more than a year ago, but as the framework and tooling changed a bunch of times, I kind of got tired of trying to keep up, and I let it just hang out for a long time. As I've been engaged at various levels of deep coding at work (usually 0 or 100 mph, never somewhere in between), so goes the mental bandwidth for my little open source project, which has existed in one form or another for more than 16 years. The progress was in spurts, but there was progress. Heck, I even have a CI build now! Here's the timeline:

I'm at a point now where POP Forums is mostly ported to ASP.NET Core, and I'm super happy with it. I've done some minor tweaks here and there, but mostly it's the "old" code running in the context of the new framework. I mentioned before that my intention is not to really add a ton of features for this release, but I do want to make it capable of scaling out, which is to say run on multiple nodes. I haven't done any real sniffing on SQL performance or anything, but I noticed that I had some free, simple load testing available as part of my free-level Visual Studio Team Services account, so that seemed convenient.

While porting a form from POP Forums to ASP.NET Core, I was surprised to find that there is not a TagHelper version of the old HtmlHelper AddValidationClass. In the old world, you could do a field group like this, using the Bootstrap magic:

Going way back to, I think, .NET v3, ASP.NET had this new thing called Membership. Maybe it was a version earlier. I dunno. "Neat," I thought, I can write a provider adhering to this interface and use my existing user and auth structure to plug into this system. Then I saw that the membership and role providers each had about a bazillion (maybe quadbazillion) members to implement, and reality set in that what I already had was working just fine. Some years later, ASP.NET offered Identity, this newer thing that did sort of the same thing. It even made its way into Core.

The volatility over ASP.NET Core made me pause (twice) since last fall when it came to porting POP Forums to the new platform. Every new release broke things to the point of frustration, and the RC2 reboot was hard. With SignalR falling a bit behind, it made things worse. But alas, that seems to be mostly behind us, and I've started committing stuff to a branch again, a little at a time, to run on the new ASP.NET. It's not at all usable, and every change seems to invite more changes, but I'm starting to see the potential and love for ASP.NET Core.

One of the things that ASP.NET Core promises is a faster, streamlined processing pipeline. Naturally, you start to wonder how fast your pages render before being spit out into the tubes. With the fantastic ability to chain middleware in the pipeline (think HttpModules and HttpHandlers, only without the bazillion events), it's super easy to wrap most of the processing in a timer.