[Question] Some questions about the state of the project

[gigios]

• Is the project active?
• Is there a plan to migrate to .net 7 (and in future .net 8)?
• When is there a plan to release "stable" version 2?

[natemcmaster]

As explained in https://github.com/natemcmaster/DotNetCorePlugins/issues/117, the only pieces of work I had originally planned to do were for maintenance.

However, given little interest I have in maintaining this and that there have been more questions asked than real bugs in the code, I'm considering archiving this on GitHub so there is less confusing about whether opened issues will actually get fixed or not. Basically -- they won't because I'm was the only maintainer and I lost interest in this project years ago.

[gigios]

I am sad about this decision. Mine was only meant to be a question if such a library there was anyway an interest in keeping it 'alive' to fix any problems and bugs (at the moment I have absolutely found none!!!). The question is also related to the possibility of migrating it to the new versions of the framework & C. Anyway, thank you for your answer and for the very useful library you made.

[natemcmaster]

It’s good to hear you found it useful!

To be clear, I haven’t archived yet. I’m considering it. If other people want to chip in to maintain it, we can keep this alive. But as you can guess by the slow responses, I’m not very active on GitHub anymore.

[KingWizard1]

Big fan of this library -- I'm using it in a .NET 8 Blazor application -- it's by far the easiest to use of the few that are out there. For my project, the hot reloading feature is absolutely fantastic. Users don't have to restart the entire application to get an updated version of a component 😄

[rsanford-hh2]

I want to chime in that I'm also a huge fan of this project. I wrote an internal-use app using the 2.0 Beta version that has gone into production and the developers that maintain it are thrilled with the simplicity of adding new functionality by releasing simple plugins.

I don't know if you've had any luck in getting someone to help you maintain it, but I'm willing to donate some time to get 2.0 to a release if there's a cogent list of changes that need to be made.

[Sojaner]

I just wanted to mention that this project is a gem in the .net ecosystem especially when working with microservices. I think we should all put efforts to pushing it keeping it alive. Also wanted to drop this here to show that it's not just me, and there are thousands of us out there! :)

[natemcmaster]

Thanks all for the supportive comments!

I released the 2.0 beta to nuget almost 2 years ago, around the time personal changes in my life made it so I had less time for open source. I parked all open source work, but am finding myself with a little time to look at things again.

As far as getting 2.0 to a stable release, the main thing to do is test and make sure it works. If I recall correctly, the only real change between 1.4 and 2.0 beta was that I deleted a bunch of dependencies that were necessary to make plugin loading work in .NET Core 1 and 2. Now that .NET 5+ has stabilized quite a bit, I think those old versions of .NET are not working supporting anymore. Dropping that simplifies the dependencies of this library.

If there are other big features or bugs you want to contribute, let me know. We can review the backlog of issues open on this repository for ideas.

[Misiu]

I also would like to say thank you for your time and effort. I'm in the process of preparing to migrate an old plugin-based app that used Autofac to .NET8. When searching for alternatives I see your packages in multiple places and after reading GitHub issues I'm sure it will work perfectly. I'll try to prepare POC in the next couple of days using version 2.0.0 and report any problems/bugs. Or course I'll try to contribute as much as I can.

Again, thank you 🙂