Scott Hanselman

The .NET Core and the Core Libraries are open source and run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In fact, you can run them with support, today, in production on Windows and Linux (Mac is for development, not production).

Head over to http://get.asp.net to get ASP.NET 5 with .NET Core on any platform. Also get the free cross platform editor Visual Studio Code as well.

Because .NET Core runs anywhere, there are things that it doesn't have. It doesn't have a UI layer (no WinForms, for example, because that makes no sense on Linux) or Registry Access (that's only on Windows, so it's simply omitted). While these omissions make sense, others don't exist because of lack of times, changing priorities, or peoplepower.

Currently, as of the time of this blog post's writing, .NET Core has no good built-in option for image resizing or image generation/creation. There is no System.Drawing because there is no Win32 GDI. There are some options, that I'll point out later, but this clearly hasn't been a priority so it's not done yet. There has been some work on System.Drawing.Graphics, but it seems stalled.

Nathanael Jones is the very accomplished author of ImageResizer and the primary at Imazen, an imaging software company. I've talked about ImageResizer before, it's fantastic. Nathanael has been pushing hard to get folks at Microsoft to commit to a story around Server-side Graphics in ASP.NET 5 and recently updated his own roadmap with respect to ImageResizer and the new ASP.NET 5 (that runs on .NET Core as well as the full .NET Framework). Take a moment and read it, there's a lot there. Concerns about how to call native code, how to distribute managed code that has to call native code, and lots more. I've worked with Nathanael for the last year trying to work out some way to solve this problem but it hasn't worked out well. Big company, sigh.

Another library in the .NET imaging space is called ImageProcessor by James M. South. Jim also wants to solve the program of server side image manipulation. He's currently working on a re-write of his ImageProcessor as a cross-platform library and I'm sure he would appreciate your help.

Jim himself says:

Is this wise? Honestly... I don't know. I could be writing code that may be suddenly obsolete. There has been little feedback on questions I've asked but it's a nice learning process if anything and I will definitely be releasing the code for consumption.

Over in the Microsoft corefxlab repo Jim has asked some questions and tried to push as well, but the issue is currently closed. Fortunately it is just closed for lack of interest. Krzysztof Cwalina from Microsoft says:

We have nobody working actively on this. It's a interesting problem space, but it does not align with our current priorities. I will close this for now. Please let me know if anybody wants to work on it and I will reopen.

Enter, you, us, the community. Jim has asked for help, and I'm also asking for help. Is Server-Side graphics manipulation in ASP.NET 5 important? Jim asks:

Please... Spread the word, contribute algorithms, submit performance improvements, unit tests. Help me set up CI for nightly releases.

Performance is a biggie, if you know anything about the new vector types and can apply some fancy new stuff with that it would be awesome.

There's a lot of developers out there who could write this stuff a lot better and faster than I and I would love to see what we collectively can come up with so please, if you can help in any way it would be most welcome and beneficial for all.

So, two things.

First, head over to https://github.com/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor/tree/V3 and talk to James M. South on Twitter. If you can, offer support. Perhaps help with a AppVeyor setup, or offer your own CI server for builds. Do you have a need for server-side image work now or perhaps you have a cache of unit tests? See what you can offer. Even if you're a First Timer to Open Source.

Second, if you want to work on it, either with James, or with Microsoft, check out the closed issues on GitHub at https://github.com/dotnet/corefxlab/issues/86#issuecomment-158459437 and engage there. It'd be awesome to see this problem solved.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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