This week FluentAssertions, a popular open source library designed to make it easier to write assertions during unit testing, changed its license from Apache 2.0 to some commercial terms under the name of a new business entity, Xceed.

The net impact of this is that FluentAssertions now costs $129.95 per seat for commercial use for version 8.0 and later.

Naturally the .NET community was in uproar over this on /r/dotnet and in a few other places, like this comment from the “.NET Eventing Framework” thread which inspired “.NET Developers Begging for Ecosystem Destruction”

In this post we’re going to unpack two things:

1. Impact of the FluentAssertions change and
2. Broader questions about what .NET users would prefer: “re-license or die?”

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As of Monday this week, my company Petabridge turns 10 years old. I’ve been my own boss for longer, but my tenure at Petabridge is nearly 5x my tenure at every other company I’ve founded and at every place I’ve worked.

When you set out on a new venture, rarely do you expect things to go this well or last this long - so I decided to take some time to cobble together 10 lessons that have kept me sane throughout my entire odyssey with Petabridge.

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My management style has evolved a lot over the years, but one constant I’ve kept from the beginning is to coach the best possible performance out of my players. That seems like an vacuous management platitude, but it’s not: doing this requires tremendous patience, brutal-yet-sympathetic candor, and an ability plus...

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If you follow me on Twitter / X, you have likely seen several increasingly exasperated tweets from me about a legacy software project from hell. This project deserves its own series of blog posts and YouTube videos, but in service to a higher calling in the field of software I’ll reveal it now: these coding horrors all originate from our rewrite of Sdkbin.

More accurately: we decided the best path forward was to rescue Sdkbin 1.0 and not rewrite it after all, but we’re still conducting the software equivalent of tearing a building down to its foundation and starting over again.

For all of its faults, Sdkbin does generate a significant amount of revenue for us each year. We’ve kept it on life support for four years because its original author left it in utterly incomprehensible shape. In this post I’m going to talk about the plague that’s killed four years of opportunities and left this project swaddled in technical debt before it even served its first customer: frameworkism.

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In this post we’re going to travel back in time to 2010 - a happier, simpler time for early-stage startup software developers. When Heroku was free and front-end developers hadn’t had a chance to ruin the JavaScript ecosystem yet. We will eventually make our way back to 2024 .NET-land.

Ruby Land: 2010-2014

Back in the MarkedUp and early Petabridge days, I worked out of Coloft in Santa Monica, CA - a pioneer in the co-working space in Los Angeles. We had lots of startups and software developers of every shade working out of the space - it was even Uber’s original LA office location until they outgrew it.

But one group of developers who left a lasting impression on me was a Ruby on Rails consulting shop that specialized in delivering SaaS and mobile back-ends for Apple’s fledgling App Store (back in 2010.)

What these guys had down was a one-size-fits-all universal template for delivering client applications:

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When talking to members of our team about their projects and taking on more responsibility for their outcomes I will regularly recommend the following:

“You should hate your own work product and still ship it anyway.”

This advice is as applicable for shipping software as it is for sending sales emails, graphic design, sweeping floors, or writing this very blog post. But why give it in the first place?

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I recently waded into the waters of an intentionally obtuse piece of engagement bait on .NET Twitter, mostly because I thought it was funny:

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An ASP.NET GitHub thread entitled “Epic: Eventing Framework in .NET 9” ignited an inferno of criticism for the usual reasons: Microsoft big-footing its own .NET OSS ecosystem, etc, etc…

A few years ago I would have cared about that, but this is simply in Microsoft’s nature - as I’ve written about here before. No amount of public venting of nerd rage or OSS community spirit is going to reach the top of the ivory tower over there. Only changes to Azure spend can make that happen.

If you want to play in the .NET ecosystem as an OSS project, a tool maker, etc - this is the price of admission. If Microsoft entering your space is enough to make you quit or enough to kill your business then you were never creative, determined, or passionate enough to succeed in the first place.

Microsoft claims they’re working on this framework mostly just to improve Azure WebJobs and therefore this isn’t really a threat to MassTransit, Wolverine, MediatR, et al but I don’t believe that. Why make it an epic within ASP.NET, by far the most popular framework in the ecosystem, if you don’t intend to have third parties actually use it?

That aside, it’s not the reaction of the OSS producers or Microsoft on that thread I found interesting - it was the reaction of .NET OSS consumers that caught me by surprise.

Many .NET developers were vocally cheering on the destruction of these popular third party frameworks, as though having multiple, well-maintained tools was an inconvenience that needed solving.

Who are the .NET developers demanding that .NET destroy its own ecosystem and return to .NET to the uncompetitive, intellectual ghetto of yesteryear?

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Towards the end of 2023 I had some rare downtime and decided to use it to develop a new skill I’ve wanted to learn: leveraging .NET’s impressive Roslyn Compiler Platform to help Akka.NET users be more productive at compile-time.

That interest propelled me to release Akka.Analyzers, a new set of Roslyn Analyzers + Code Fix Providers that we’ve incorporated directly into the core Akka NuGet package as a transitive dependency going forward, so all Akka.NET users and all packages built on top of Akka.NET will benefit directly from our efforts there in perpetuity.

In this blog post I want to discuss one tricky and important obstacle that was not explained very well in any of the literature I found online: how to actually format the Roslyn-enabled NuGet package correctly. This is non-obvious.

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One of the concepts that’s commonplace on software development Twitter / Reddit et al is the notion that management is ultimately responsible for everything that’s done by their employees - i.e. the captain is responsible for the behavior of the crew.

And in a sense this is true - from...

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