BfUpdater is the backend app that updates the bravefrontier_data repo and /r/bravefrontier’s sidebar, and also acts as an IRC and Discord bot. The entire thing is written in C#, but a constant pain point was deploying to Mono. Take the Discord.Net library for example. WebSockets as used by Discord.Net is broken by newer versions of Mono, requiring a downgrade of Mono, and newer versions of Discord.Net are completely non-functional on Mono regardless of workarounds.
So, I decided on migrating the project to target .NET Core rather than the .NET Framework with Mono, starting off with copying the entire project into a new .NET Core project skeleton. Here were some areas of interest I encountered while migrating the project:
Libraries
Finding newer versions of libraries that were used that support .NET Core was ok for the most part. The only library that I used without .NET Core support was SmartIrc4Net, but since the #bravefrontier channel was pretty much dead, I just removed the IRC code completely and didn’t worry about switching to a new library.
API Changes
This was where all the fun came from. The code made extensive use of WebClient, which is gone in .NET Core. So, after writing a bunch of extensions for HttpClient and a bit of regex search and replace later all the network related code was running again.
One of the harder things to account for was the removal of System.Diagnostics.StackTrace, which I used for logging method names by looking for the log’s caller. Instead of trying to parse the output from Environment.StackTrace, I decided to make use of Microsoft’s ILogger and deal with the fact that my logs no longer have method-level names, but only class-level names.