Working full-time with getting Nancy running on CoreCLR

For the past three weeks I have been living the dream - full-time development of Nancy, while still picking up a salary. Not long after I wrote my blog post about "Support the development of Nancy financially" I was contacted by a company, that are invested in Nancy and wanted to discuss a potential win-win scenario.

A couple of conference calls later and the deal was signed for me to work, full-time, on fast-tracking our plans to make Nancy run on the CoreCLR. This has always been a goal of ours, but we have been holding back on it because it has been a very moving target and there have been plenty of other fish in the sea to focus on.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Support the development of Nancy financially

Working on Nancy has always been a labor of love. We have never thought about charging for commercial use or in any other put up a pay wall that restricts your use of the framework. During the past five years, thousands of hours have been put into making Nancy what is it today and it makes us extremely proud that it is being used in production, all over the world and in a wide range of products.

That said, even though Nancy itself is free to use, the development of it is not. Each hour we spend working on Nancy is an hour less we could have spent working on other personal projects or spending time with friends and family.

As with most project, time is the most valuable commodity we have (apart from domain knowledge!) and its availability varies over time. Our ambition for Nancy is far greater than the time we have at our disposal. Even as little as a couple of hours of extra time, each week, would have a tremendous impact.

It is for this reason we are now turning toward you, our community of existing users, that put Nancy into production and help you ship software. If Nancy adds value to your organization then we would ask for your attention for a couple of minutes and read on about how you can help us keep delivering awesome stuff.

Either way we are going to keep working on Nancy, but together we can take it to another level. We won't be able to do it without your help!

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Nancy v1.4.2 will break the versioning schema

Usually when we put out a new version of Nancy, we also bump the version number of all other Nancy packages, even if they have not had any changes.

This approach has made it easy to know that you are using a version that is guaranteed to be compatible with the current Nancy version. It has made upgrading easy since you just update the Nancy package and it will update all other packages that has a dependency on the Nancy package.

However, now that the v1.x releases have officially entered maintenance mode, we have decided that the v1.4.2 release will break this tradition. For the v1.4.2 release we will only update the Nancy package it self and leave the remaining packages at v1.4.1.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Our plans for Nancy 1.x and beyond

At the time that I write this, Nancy is less than two weeks (the 20th!) shy of turning 5 years old. For any open-source project that is quite an achievement and I dare to say that for one that is based on .NET it is amazing.

If we turn it into numbers, we put out 37 releases (a bit more than 7 per year), had 228 unique (only counting the main repository) contributors and 1237 closed pull-requests. We have had the pleasure of seeing the community embrace it, job ads pop up and people traveling to conferences, all over the world, to deliver sessions on our framework. Amazing!

In February, of this year, we put out the v1.0 release and just the other day we released v1.4.1 into the wild. Needless to say, it has been a very rewarding and humbling experience. Now, it might sound like I am about to drop the bomb and tell you all that we have decided to discontinue working on Nancy. In fact, that is the exact opposite of what I am going to tell you!

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

I am now taking contract work for Nancy.

I am pleased to be able to announce that I am now able to accept Nancy based contract work (world wide).

If you are building products based on Nancy and you are looking for help with (but not limited to) code reviews, training / workshops, team coaching / mentoring, project implementations or problem solving, then you should drop me a line. I am based in Sweden so ideally looking for clients that are comfortable with remote workers, although I will also be available to occasionally work on-site.

On the legal side, all contracts will go through my employer, tretton37, which is one of the top consultancy agencies in Sweden, so you won't be dealing directly with a "one man band". Another benefit of this is that I am not the only one capable of a providing this kind of expertise at tretton37, so even if I am unavailable at the time, chances are good that we will still be able to provide you with the help you need.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Improving the EditorWindow class in Unity

Extending the Unity editor UI is pretty simple. They have a bunch of classes that you inherit from and the editor will automatically discover and wire them up for you.

A couple of days ago I started looking into extending the editor with a custom window for some behavior tree work I am doing. I wanted to create a simple tree designer.

The initial spike went well and I managed to open up a new window, with very little code and no problems, but then I fell into the rabbit hole...

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Indie Team Up

We have all been there. We have had one or more awesome project ideas but we knew that it was either too big to tackle on our own, or we were lacking experience in some key areas to make it happen.

Instinctively we start shopping around for help amonst friends and contacts, but it is still hard to find someone that shares your vision, have the time to help out and that has the skills that are required to pull it off.

So we tell ourselves that it probably was not such a good idea anyway and move along. Recognise yourself? I sure know I have found myself in that situation more times than I can remember.

But it does not have to be that way. There are millions of people out there that are feeling the same thing and if we could only find them then we could do amazing things togehter. This is exactly the vision that Colleen Wilson, Justin Hammond and Shawn Deprey have with their Indie Team Up idea.

I had the oppertunity to catch them on Skype and talk to help about Indie Team Up and their vision for it.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Changing the way we work on GitHub

Being a distributed team, GitHub is our single most important piece of the puzzle that makes up Nancy. With the recent changes in our governance, we felt we needed to make some changes on how we work on GitHub.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson

Nancy hosting, OWIN and ASP.NET vNext

Nancy has always been disconnected from the underlaying host, enabling you to run Nancy on top of ASP.NET, self-hosted, as part of your WCF service, or embedded pretty much wherever you want.

We were also the first full framework to adopt OWIN based hosting, through our Nancy.Hosting.Owin nuget. With the recent 0.23.0 release we moved our OWIN host into the core project as a stepping stone.

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© Copyright 2013, Andreas Håkansson