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diff --git a/drafts/dotnet 5.0: use it.html b/drafts/dotnet 5.0: use it.html deleted file mode 100644 index 766445e..0000000 --- a/drafts/dotnet 5.0: use it.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,71 +0,0 @@ -<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> |