Hayden Barnes on .NET NES: Why We Need a New Approach to Open Source Maintenance
Strategic Technology Consultation Services This episode of The Modern .NET Show is supported, in part, by RJJ Software's Strategic Technology Consultation Services. If you're an SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) leader wondering why your technology investments aren't delivering, or you're facing critical decisions about AI, modernization, or team productivity, let's talk. 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