POP Forums for .NET Core is thriving
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.
The last significant release came in December, as v14.1.0 supports Core v2.2.0. v14.x came about last summer as (finally) a full port of the previous ASP.NET MVC version.
This year I've been focusing on shoring up some of the stuff in the backlog while setting some real goals for v15:
- Don't go nuts with new front-end technologies, but pick one and use it with the admin area. That will be Vue.js, and I haven't really started it yet.
- Take advantage of Razor class libraries to pack all of the views in a Nuget package.
- Build all the things for scale-out:
- Adopt Redis for caching so you can run multiple nodes.
- Get the background tasks out of the web app so you can optionally run them in Azure Functions.
- Use real queues to send work to the Azure Functions.
- Make it easy to use Azure Search or ElasticSearch as the backing engine for the search functionality.
- Fix a bunch of issues.
I setup a project board on Github to organize it, and you can see I'm not far from finishing now.
Because I have a CI pipeline through Azure DevOps, every commit runs the latest bits on a dev site, but I'm also using the packages generated on CoasterBuzz with a small but respectable load. What I've found in local testing is that I can easily start pushing 1k requests per second without a lot of trouble, so I'm guessing multiple nodes in an Azure App Service and SQL scaled up, it can handle some serious load.
If you're interested, follow the project on Github, paying particular attention to updates to the Wiki, and I'm finally getting my documentation game on.