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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>