Hayden Barnes on .NET NES: Why We Need a New Approach to Open Source Maintenance

The Modern .NET Show

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3d ago 57:55

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Show Notes

"There's a good chance it's not gonna flag for you that, you, know your point of sale system is on .NET six and is now vulnerable, you know. So to a certain extent, companies often aren't even aware and this is something I've learned to be in this space. They're not aware. If they are aware, they know they need to upgrade. They're not sure, you know, when they're gonna find the resources, the time, the capital to upgrade"— Hayden Barnes

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. I'm your host Jamie Taylor, bringing you conversations with the brightest minds in the .NET ecosystem.

Today, we're joined by Hayden Barnes to talk about HeroDevs and their Never Ending Support offering; a service where HeroDevs backport security fixes from later versions of dependencies, allowing companies to hold off on upgrading their important dependencies until they are ready to.

"In some cases we simply hire the upstream developer or the upstream development team and they can continue to work on new features and the latest versions while maintaining the post-EOL versions and backporting those security updates. In some cases, we hire that library maintainer on contract."— Hayden Barnes

Along the way, we talked about how the release schedule for .NET (one year per major release, with rolling support for up to 36 months) is a little to agile for some enterprise companies, and how HeroDevs can help. We also talked about how, where possible, HeroDevs actually hire the open source maintainers for packages to do the backporting, feeding funding back into the open source ecosystem.

We also mentioned that this support doesn't just apply to post-end-of-life for versioned software. We also talk about the very unfortunate position where a developer is suddenly unable to support their work. An example that I bring up is previous guest on the show Jon P Smith, who in 2024 was diagnosed with dementia; meaning that at some point his libraries will need to be passed on to other open source developers. During the recording, I couldn't remember Jon's name, and for that I apologise. Jon has a very in depth blog post about the start of his journey with dementia called "How to update a NuGet library once the author isn't available." Please go read his blog post when you have the chance.

Before we jump in, a quick reminder: if The Modern .NET Show has become part of your learning journey, please consider supporting us through Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee. Every contribution helps us continue bringing you these in-depth conversations with industry experts. You'll find all the links in the show notes.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-8/hayden-barnes-on-net-nes-why-we-need-a-new-approach-to-open-source-maintenance/

Useful Links:

How to update a NuGet library once the author isn't available
HeroDevs
Hayden

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Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show.

Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services.

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