PgRoutiner Blog

PgRoutiner is a set of command-line tools I created for fun and for my development needs while working on various .NET and PostgreSQL projects.

It integrates with .NET project configuration and allows you to do various stuff out of the box, no configuration needed. For example:

This is just one small example. PgRoutiner is incredibly feature-rich. As it happened, I was constantly adding new features as I was working on other projects. Initially, it was intended to be my personal code generator to relieve me of writing boring data-access code (calling a function and mapping the results, for example).

It was first published as the .NET Global Tool because that was, and still is - the most convenient and easiest way of managing different versions and updates, at least for me. I was really surprised to find out that, at the time of writing this blog, it had over 135K. That's, well, decent, but still not much. Note, while I was working on this blog series, it grew over 140K already.

However, I really didn't think anyone else would want to use it.

It was more of a fun experiment for me. It changed concepts a couple of times; it is loaded with features, and I thought it would be too complicated to be used by someone other than me. I guess I was wrong. I didn't even have time to properly finish the entire documentation, as you can see on the main readme file.

But I did create a nice presentation at one point. In any case, that won't stop me from blogging about it.

A few days ago, I did a migration of PgRoutiner to the new .NET8, and I wanted to try out how it works with the new NativeAOT Feature of the NET8. Native AOT is when we take our normal NET8 project, and we compile it to a native binary executable for the target OS.

AOT builds have very short, almost instantaneous startup times and are, in general, very optimized and fast.

It required some reconfiguration and some tweaking, and some parts had to be rewritten completely - but the final result blew me away: AOT build runs so fast that it is a completely different user experience. I can't go back to the normal .NET Tool after this.

If anyone wants to try it out, builds are on the GitHub release page.

So, what is it, and how it works?

See the PgRoutiner Concept next.