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-<h1>Use .NET 5.0 To Be Rid of Windows Server!</h1>
-
-<p>
- I work at a three-letter company. The majority of our development teams are
- heavily invested in Java and .NET Framework. Our team has traditionally shied
- away from .NET Framework for what I'm guessing is a pretty common reason: it
- only runs on Windows. For many shops this probably isn't a big deal but for
- our team it was a bit of an annoyance. Most of our software gets wrapped up in
- containers and deployed to an on-site Kubernetes cluster. However, we have one
- small application that needs to talk to a proprietary vendor library written
- in .NET Framework. That means that 99% of our stuff is deployed using the same
- methods and in the same location. The other 1% was this little app, and it
- actually caused us quite a few headaches. Luckily, .NET 5.0 came out recently.
- It represents the convergence of .NET Core and .NET Framework into a single,
- cross-platform runtime. This is one of the only times in my career that a
- single upgrade has magically solved everything.
-</p>
-
-<p>
- The library in question is an older .NET Framework (not .NET Standard, which
- can be included in Framework or Core projects) collection of .dlls that lets
- us communicate with the vendor's systems. It's basically a platform-dependent
- SDK. Our only requirement was to make accessible a table of information on the
- vendor's system via the SDK. At the time, the simplest thing to do seemed to
- be an ASP.NET Core app that rendered a very basic HTML table constructed from
- vendor data. And it worked just fine, tested great. The whole project wasn't
- more than a few thousand SLOC.
-</p>
-
-<p>
- Everything was going swimmingly all the way through deployment. We knew that
- because we had to target .NET Framework for our project to build, we would
- need to build a Windows Server instance. So we did that and set used Visual
- Studio + IIS to create a deployment pipeline. This was alright; click publish
- and the new version builds, deploys, and goes live. Then things started to get
- weird.
-</p>
-
-<p>
- Our application had some config to know which servers to log into. This was
- stored in <code>appsettings.Env.json</code>, where <code>Env</code> changed
- for Development and Production. For whatever reason, regardless of the
- environment we specified (typically
- <code>ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Production</code>), the config would default to
- Development after an application restart. There were a few problems
- interacting at once here. First, why was the app restarting? It seemed like if
- we started it up, it would run great. If we left it alone for a while, it
- would die. Then, accessing its URL again would slowly bring it back to life.
- When it came back to life it had the Development config. Only a manual app
- restart would bring the Production config back, and then only until it went to
- sleep again.
-</p>
-
-<p>
- Keep in mind this was a purely default deployment environment. Vanilla Windows
- Server 2016, base install of IIS with no tweaking. Even the ASP.NET Core
- project was scaffolded by the <code>dotnet</code> CLI tool. We just added some
- source code that changed the homepage by running a few library functions.
-</p>
-
-<p>Eventually we tracked down the</p>
-
-- resources - patching/AMI upgrades - IIS weirdness
-
-<p>
- quick ASP.NET Core app on top of their .NET Framework library app, fired up
- Windows Server, and shoved it there. It wouldn't let us forget about it. For a
- myriad of reasons, maintaining IIS as a reverse proxy to the application (for
- certificates, etc.) produced strange and unusual behavior. For example, IIS
- comes with a collection of
-</p>