Development update

[leMicin]

Introduction

Sidekick was initially developed using WPF as its display technology. We have since moved over to Blazor + Electron. Now that the move has been completed, we can now change our architecture to something that fits Blazor in a much better way. If you wanted to contribute in the past and were scared off by the complexity of the code, we encourage you to look at the code again. It should be easier to understand.

New Architecture

The new architecture aims to be a lot more simple to understand. There is a lot less layers to go through to be able to do something. The new architecture consists of multiple smaller "module" projects that are isolated from the other modules. We also have some Api projects whose only role is to facilitate communications to other Apis.

Changes

• Removed Layers. We no longer have Domain, Application, Repository, Infrastructure, Presentation layers. Just enumerating these makes me realize how complicated this actually is. Instead of well defined, isolated layers, we have well defined, isolated modules.
• Removed database except for PoeNinjaApi. There is no database to maintain anymore. Most logic that used the database has been refactored to use a newly created ICacheProvider which saves json files on the disk instead.
• Most of the logic is now located inside the Blazor components. This makes it easy to understand and follow the logic.
• Removed Mediatr. The pattern had advantages, but it became way too confusing to follow where and when the code was being executed.
• Removed AutoMapper. One less dependency to have to learn.
  Initialization code has been simplified into 3 distinct modules/pages. The initialization process will navigate to the following pages in order: /update, /setup, /initialize
• Removed View enum. To open pages, we now need to pass in the url.
• Removed crash reporting. We had a Sentry account setup, but the amount of errors we got was overwhelming and overflowed the free plan. Also we were not looking at them much. In Blazor 5, there is no easy of trapping global exceptions happening. This feature may come back in Blazor 6.