Every year, around this time, I try to dedicate significant time to address any large project work that may have been percolating around MarcEdit. This year will be no different. Over the past 4 months, I’ve been working on moving MarcEdit away from the .NET 4.7.2 Framework to .NET Core 3.1. There a lot of reasons for looking at this, the most important being that this is the direction Microsoft is taking the framework – a move to unify the various .NET development platforms to make distribution and maintenance easier. Well, with the release of .NET 5 this Nov., all the tools I need to officially make this transition are now in place.
So, over the next two months, I’ll be working on shifting MarcEdit away from Framework 4.7.2 and to .NET 5. I believe this will be possible – I only have concerns about two libraries that I rely on – and if I have to, both are open source so I can look at potentially spending time helping the project maintainers target a non-framework build. My hope is to have a working version of MarcEdit using NET 5 by Thanksgiving that I can start unit testing and testing locally.
Of course, with this change, I’ll also have to change the installer process. The reason is that this transition will remove the necessity of having to have .NET installed on one’s machine. One of the changes to the framework is the ability to publish self contained applications – allowing for faster startup and lower memory usage. This is something I’m excited about as I currently move slowly updating build frameworks due to the need to have these frameworks installed locally. By removing that dependency, I’m hoping to be able to take advantages of changes to the C# language that make programming easier and more efficient, while also allowing me to remove some of the work around code I’ve had to develop to account for bugs or limitations in previous frameworks.
Finally, this change is going to simplify a lot of cross platform development – and once the initial transition has occurred, I’ll be spending time working on expanding the MarcEdit MacOS version. There are a couple of areas where this program still lacks parity in relation to the Windows version, and these changes will give me the opportunity to close many of these gaps.
–tr