Creating Simple Tasks in .NET with Bullseye

Sponsor: Using RabbitMQ or Azure Service Bus in your .NET systems? Well, you could just use their SDKs and roll your own serialization, routing, outbox, retries, and telemetry. I mean, seriously, how hard could it be?

ow many times have you created a console application to run specific tasks in .NET? These tasks could be processing a file, making some HTTP call to an external service or even helping in your build process. Ultimately ending up with a collection of different tasks which often have dependencies on each other. I just discovered a project called Bullseye by Adam Ralph which really feels like a simple task runner. But better yet, is just a library you add to your own console application and not its own process itself.

Bullseye

Bullseye is a .NET package for describing and running targets and their dependencies. Bullseye can be used to write targets that do anything. It is not coupled to building .NET projects. Platform support: .NET Standard 1.3 and upwards.

Examples

The simplest example which is described on the Bullseye readme is similar to as follows:

There’s really only two components needed. Define your target(s) using the Target() methods and then specify which targets to run via RunTargets() If you do not specify a target to run then the “default” target is used. If you simply run dotnet run will produce the output:

This would have been the equivalent of running dotnet run default

Dependencies

Here’s a simple example of having one target depend on another. In one target I’m hitting a service to get the exchange rate from CAD to USD. In another, I want to save that rate to a file.

When run with dotnet run saveexchangerate

Now if I just want to get the rate but not save it, I could just run dotnet run getexchangerate

Targets

How are you handling running small tasks/targets? Simple console applications? Using the new global tools? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.

Follow @CodeOpinion