Resgrid Engineering Update 9/29/20

To keep Resgrid up to date with the latest Technologies and allow for maximum efficiency and future stability we make the investment every 3 years or so to perform a major overhaul of the system. It’s time consuming, and not very glamorous work but it pays out dividends for the few years afterwards as we can be more efficient and open up new possibilities.

The major overhaul we’ve started on is upgrading Resgrid’s backend technology from Microsoft .Net Framework 4.7 to .Net Core 3.1 and .Net Standard.

In addition to this major overhaul we are also migrating our backend database technology from Entity Framework to Dapper.

These are 2 very large changes but they both unlock some exciting possibility for the Resgrid system. Firstly, migrating to .Net Core allow Resgrid to properly run on Linux, Unix and MacOS systems where previous our server technologies were limited to Windows environments. This then enables us to fully Containerize our infrastructure with Docker to better support complex turn-key deployment scenarios. There are also a whole plethora of performance enhancements in the .Net Core framework that will make Resgrid faster.

The next major change were doing at this time is to move our backend Data Access technology from Entity Framework to Dapper. The reason were doing this is to simplify the data access layer, as we currently mix EF and Dapper, and to easily support multiple database technologies.

Currently Resgrid is built on top of Microsoft SQL Server and that is our preferred database backend. But we understand that for on premises deployments people want more flexibility in their databases so were using Dapper to enable Resgrid to leverage the PostgreSQL server.

Our target is to have this deployed and fully operational by the end of October 2020 with a corresponding Open Source release on our Github page.