Icing on the Cake – reviewing the recipe for 2016

Published Saturday, December 31, 2016 Category Announcement Author devlead

As 2016 is just about to be fully baked, the year has been packed with many ingredients, with this post we would like to take the opportunity to reflect on a few of the essences of what's been a truly amazing and eventful Cake year.

Community

First of all we must highlight, and send a big THANK YOU to, the amazing community that has formed around Cake!

There are now over one hundred individual contributors to the various Cake projects, helping out with documentation, adding new features, raising issues and fixing bugs. In addition, over a quarter of a million downloads of the main Cake NuGet package! Together, with you, during 2016 we released no less than fifteen releases!

As maintainers of an open source project it's both amazing and humbling so see how people are getting a taste for your project and going out speaking, blogging, tweeting and helping out fellow bakers on the Gitter chat, Stack Overflow, forums and social media.

Debugging support

In May we added support for debugging your Cake scripts with Visual Studio, enabling you to do things like stepping through code, setting break points and watch variables. In September we added debugging in VSCode as well.

.NET Foundation

One of the bigger announcements of 2016, was in June when Gary at NDC Oslo announced that Cake joins the .NET foundation. Joining the foundation ensures the longevity of the Cake project, making sure it's here to stay and has the resources to do so.

Cake Contribution Organization

In August we launched the Cake Contribution Organization to ensure that any addins and modules that are created, can continue to be maintained, should the original developer no longer be in a position to maintain it. It has been very well received and there's now almost one hundred NuGet packages that have adopted the cake-contrib as a co-maintainer of the package and twenty-six projects that have chosen to move their repositories into the GitHub organization.

.NET Core support

Cake was early to support the .NET Core tooling, but in September we announced Cake v0.16.0 released. With this release finally Cake itself was able to run cross platform on .NET Core. This was the largest refactoring we've ever done and it was a great feeling to get that out the door!

The Team

In December we added an additional member to the team, Alistair Chapman, he's been an amazing asset, contributing directly to Cake, surrounding tooling and in supporting the community. He's been the mastermind behind the Cake for Visual Studio extension and Cake for Yeoman.

In the spotlight

2016 certainly feels like the year awareness of the project exponentially increased, Cake core team members appeared on no less than six podcasts, a number of conference presentations, articles in the news and blog posts. It's truly amazing and humbling feeling that so many have found and appreciate the project.

Closing words

Yet again a big thanks do all that have contributed to Cake, 2016 has been a great journey and we're really looking forward to what 2017 will bring!

The Cake Team thanks you for 2016 and wishes you Happy New Year!