Stepping away from Caliburn.Micro

18 Jun 2020 by Nigel Sampson

Background

This has been a hard post to write and probably a few years over due, but human nature being what it is has delayed it longer than it should have.

Roughly eight years ago I started working at a company Marker Metro that was founded around building great Windows apps both on the desktop and phone. This was about the time of the Windows 8 launch, we were fortunate to be working with a number of launch partners and have access to early builds of Windows 8 in order to have apps in the store when the OS launched. Back then I had used Caliburn.Micro (at the time created and maintained by Rob Eisenberg) on some WPF, Silverlight and WP7 projects and wanted to use it in Windows 8. By then Rob had moved on to working mostly with Durandal so I spent some of my time at work porting CM across to Windows 8 and submitted the PR.

These PR’s ultimately led to me to take over maintenance of the CM project and over time add support for UWP and Xamarin.Forms. I’ve been very lucky with this opportunity, maintaining a popular open source project lead to many other opportunities that really snowballed, being able to speak internationally as well as the award of a Microsoft MVP for five consecutive years. I was also lucky in that my work at the time supported working on Caliburn.Micro as part of my day job.

But four years ago I moved on to a different job that wasn’t apps focused and the only time I had to work on Caliburn.Micro was late in the evening. At this point my family had grown and spare time was even more precious, for a long time I thought I could keep it up and be able to support the project even when I wasn’t using it on a day to day basis in my evenings. History has shown that it wasn’t going to happen, the time for 4.0 to be created and released is ample proof of that and I’ve put off writing this post for probably two years.

What now?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing the following.

1. Publishing a release candidate of 4.0 and as long as nothing crazy comes up will be published as the final version. I’m a little undecided on the last part as the documentation will be very out of date at that point and this may cause more confusion that it’s worth.
2. I’ll continue to pay for the domain so the website won’t disappear but will be updated to reflect the state of the project.
3. If someone is willing to step up and help maintain the project reach out and we can discuss a transition plan.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s helped me with this project over the years.