3.0.0 Planning

[kevinkuszyk]

@faddiv @SoftwareWizard as it looks like we are going to need to ship a new major version to support MVC Core 3.0, are there any other breaking changes you'd like to make?

[faddiv]

There is a neat trick for this scenarios.
It is possible to multitarget the project so the resulting nuget package will be compatible with .net core 2.x and 3.x also. I can work this on tomorrow.
(Regardless I still recommend this to be a 3.0 version.)

[faddiv]

I finished with the multi-targeting.
In the end only one breaking change in the 3.0:
The type of JsonResult.SerializerSettings changed from JsonSerializerSettings to object, therefore in the 3.0 target this also changes on JsonResultAssertions. In 2.0 remains the same so it won't break anything.
Now I working on the assertions for IConvertToActionResult.

[faddiv]

I read little more into the ActionResult and I found it is actually introduced in .net core 2.1.
I think the assertions for this should also be supported from that version.
Also as I read this is a wrapper that help swagger to better determine the possible outcomes of the action like 200 and then concrete a type for the api or some error status code. I am still thinking how should the api look like considering this.
Here is an official description: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/web-api/action-return-types?view=aspnetcore-3.1#actionresultt-type

[faddiv]

I tested multitargeting and it didn't work as I expected. Although the runtime version deployed beside the test project is the closest to the project version, the compile time and intellisense always falls back to the netstandard2.0. This means the new Should method won't be visible.
It is possible to solve this issue with MSBuild.Sdk.Extras.
What should be done? Should I use this or is it ok to drop support for older versions of .net? This also would mean that the project should target .net core not standard.

[kevinkuszyk]

@faddiv I'm a little out of touch with the MS ecosystem at the moment, so I'm a bit confused as to what they are doing with the version numbers now...

It seems the main Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc package we depend on is still on version 2.2 and hasn't been updated since 2018. Does that seem correct?

And, the release on their github repro now seem to be tied to a .net core version?

Do you know what package ID they are using now to publish MVC Core?

Moving on, my rule of thumb for libs like ours in the past was twofold:

• target the lowest and broadest set of TFMs possible, in our case netstandard2.0
• depend on the lowest upstream nuget possible, in our case Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc@2.0.0

If we need to take a new major version of any of the above, I would call that a breaking change and we'd ship a new major version too.

So where does that leave us?

According to the docs here, netstandard2.1 is the latest version and that is implemented by .net core 3.0.

And from looking through the MVC Core sources, it looks like they target netcoreapp3.1.

I think it makes sense for us to target the same TFM as Microsoft. The fact that we are targeting a more generic TFM maybe a contributing factor to #15.

Thoughts? I don't feel like I've answered your question, but hopefully we can figure out the way forward.

[faddiv]

The Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc won't be updated because starting from .net core 3 it is part of the framework and it is only available for netcoreapp3.x.
Also using netstandard2.1 is not recommended because it is not compatible with .net framework.
The only necessary thing to support the generic ActionResult and solve #15 is to update the mvc package to 2.1. This actually isn't a bad idea since from the net core 2.x the only supported version is 2.1.
What I tried originally is multitargeting the package but it works only if the api the same in every target which is not. I only found MSBuild.Sdk.Extras as possible solution but I'm unsure if it works on the build system. Also this will complicate the project structure and I unsure if this really worth it.

[faddiv]

In the end I decided in both route:
First I updated the asp.net mvc core from 2.0 to 2.1. Reason: It is not sensible to use 2.0 since the support is long ended and anyway this update is easy.
Second I applied the MSBuild.Sdk.Extras so the package will be fully compatible .net core 2.x and 3.x also.
I dont pull yet because I need to figure out what api should be best for testing the generic ActionResult to solve #15.