News on Rebus FM

Rebus FM no longer develops power trading software…

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 12:11:01 +0000

…because that particular business area has moved to a new company: Copper Energy Systems!

It has been a Rebus FM side project for almost four years now, but it has always been a project too big for one guy to handle, which is why I’ve been working together with Michael Skarum for almost half of that time.

Now the time has come to formally join our effort, and in doing so we’re bringing in two other brilliant minds: Andreas Tornbo and Casper Skov from Energy Market Partners!

Rebus FM is now an ISV partner on NordPool

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 10:53:30 +0000

Michael‘s hard word has paid off, and we passed NordPool’s conformance test (in all categories!) in the first attempt! 😎

This adds Rebus FM to the list of ISV partners, meaning that we can now offer a plug’n’play integration between NordPool and Copper Power Platform.

Having tight integration with Europe’s biggest power exchanges makes Copper Power Platform an even more compelling solution. Get in touch with me via mogens@rebus.fm if this sounds interesting to you. 🙂

Rebus FM is now a certified ISV on EPEX

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 12:35:28 +0000

Copper M7 has now completed the “M7 conformance test” (which went pretty smooth, by the way – thanks for asking! 😉)!

This adds Rebus FM to the list of certified software providers, approved to deliver tight, realtime integration with EPEX M7 – just as tight as EPEX’ own ComTrader app.

But more importantly, it means that Copper Power Platform customers trading on EPEX can get all of the possibilities that this entails, e.g. robust trade integration, realtime latest trade prices, whatever algos customers can come up with, etc.

Copper M7

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 12:02:17 +0000

I am happy to announce that Rebus FM is now in the process of becoming a “Certified ISV” on EPEX!

This will add Rebus FM to the list of approved software providers, which is a fine accolade to get, but the most interesting thing is that it will mean that ⚡Copper Power Platform⚡ will get tighter integration with the exchange, giving access to much more information as well as faster updates!

Copper Power Platform

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 12:12:45 +0000

As some of my connections might have picked up already, Rebus FM has a new business leg going! 🤠

I’ve had a lot of fun building power trading software for short term power traders since 2012, intensifying the fun over the last 3-4 years, and so a good year ago I basically decided to condense my experiences and ideas into a new product:

⚡Copper Power Platform⚡

It’s a platform for small and medium-sized short term power trading firms* interested in avoiding grunt work.

Moving day!

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:18:08 +0000

The Rebus FM headquarters has moved into the ground floor of the northern wing of this beautiful building – the old courthouse of Horsens. 🙂

The new address is

Rådhusgade 3 st.
8700 Horsens.

Looking forward to reciving old and new friends and business connections there – as always, there’s Aeropress/Hario V60 and/or freshly made americanos to be had (and beer 🤠…)

GitHub stars

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 22:58:49 +0000

Rebus has reached 1000 stars on GitHub. 🤠

It may seem like an odd thing to notice, but I couldn’t help getting all warm and fuzzy inside! In my view, that silly little number, albeit primitive and one-dimensional, is a clear indication of a something pretty important: Street credibility among programmers.

Even though Rebus started out as a selfish project, in the sense that I needed a handy messaging library that didn’t have licensing obstacles in the way of delivering great software to consulting clients, it has grown to be so much more.

Generic host

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 21:10:36 +0000

Over the years, people have often asked me if Rebus had a “generic host”, similar to NServiceBus’ Generic Host. In case you don’t know, NServiceBus’ generic host is a library that helps you easily get an NServiceBus endpoint up and running as a Windows Service.

Rebus doesn’t have a generic host though – and there’s a good reason for that! 🙂

The reason is, that there’s no reason why the Windows Service host should in any way be Rebus-specific!

MongoDB database migration

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 22:18:32 +0000

When you’re developing a fairly large application, and you design things properly, you will almost inevitably end up distilling out some nice things into independent, well-factored libraries – because, Separation of Concerns, you know… 🤓

That also happened this Friday, when Fleet Manager got its evolutionary database design library for MongoDB moved out into its own project: Mongrow.

With Mongrow, you can write database migrations as C# classes and have them executed in a safe, consistent, and deterministic manner, probably when your application starts up.

We have a mailing list

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:16:03 +0000

If you’re interested in receiving weekly emails with little nuggets of Rebus wisdom, go here and sign up! 💌

Meet Afonso

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 15:50:10 +0000

Hi everyone, meet Afonso!

Having finished a secondary school professional programme within Computing, he came to Denmark two years ago from his home island of Madeira in Portugal, to pursue an AP degree in IT Technology at Dania Academy in Viborg. 🎓

Afonso has now moved to Horsens to do his final internship here at Rebus FM, where he will spend most of his time performing a security review of Fleet Manager. 🚌

MongolianBarbecue is out as 1.0.0

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 23:06:09 +0000

It’s a nifty little tool with a silly label, but since it implements queues on top of MongoDB, the name was inevitable! 🤠

So, if all you have in the world is MongoDB, and you want to do some messaging, you can do this:

var config = new Config("mongodb://MONGOBONGO01/some-db", "messages");

to create a configuration, and then you

var producer = config.CreateProducer();
var message = new Message(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("hei"));

await producer.SendAsync("destination-queue", message);

to send a UTF8-encoded text to a queue named destination-queue, and then you

var consumer = config.CreateConsumer("destination-queue");

var message = await consumer.GetNextAsync();

// ... handle message here

to receive the message and handle it.

Tababular 3 is out

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 10:30:20 +0000

Nothing happened, really, since announcing the beta, so this is just a little public service announcement to tell you that Tababular is out now as version 3! 🙂

“What’s tababambabular?”, you might ask?

It’s just a little nifty library that can format data as tables, which is a nice thing to do sometimes.

E.g. in automated tests, instead of outputting one manually formatted crappy-looking test output after another, why not just collect the data and print it as a table? Here’s an example from the Fleet Manager’s driver, where emitted saga snapshot states are presented in a nice, readable summary form:

Rebus 5 is out

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 23:32:38 +0000

Lots of small changes, only a few of them breaking(*), nothing earth-shattering 🙂

The biggest change is probably that the test helpers (FakeBus, SagaFixture, etc.) were moved to a separate repository and its own NuGet package: Rebus.TestHelpers.

Another slightly bigger change is that Rebus now targets .NET 4.5, .NET 4.6, and .NET Standard 2.0. If anyone is missing the .NET Standard 1.3. support, please ✉️➡️hello@rebus.fm and let us know why 👻

Some of the smaller changes include a few performance improvements 💨, an extension point to customize how topic names are created out of .NET types, the ability to “fail fast” (i.e. skip retries) in various situations 💥, and a way to delay message processing when starting up the bus.

Support for Microsoft Extensions Logging

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:38:53 +0000

If you’re running your Rebus stuff on .NET Core, and you’re using “Microsoft Extensions Logging” (that’s just not a bite-sized title for a logging library), you’re in luck: Rebus now has Rebus.Microsoft.Extensions.Logging, so you can

var loggerFactory = new LoggerFactory()
	.AddYourSinksHere();

Configure.With(...)
	.Logging(l => l.MicrosoftExtensionsLogging(loggerFactory))
	.Transport(t => t.Use(...))
	.(...)
	.Start();

and have Rebus log its stuff there, too.

The package is currently in alpha, but since there’s not much to it, we expect it to be pretty stable.

Rebus’ Azure Service Bus transport now supports .NET Core

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 22:57:40 +0000

For almost a year, this GitHub issue has been open – but I’m happy to announce that I’ve closed it just now, which I’ve done of course because Rebus’ Azure Service Bus transport has now finally been ported properly to Microsoft’s new Azure Service Bus driver.

When the new driver came out, lots of people were puzzled, because it lacked the management operations from the original driver. This meant that queue creation, topic creation, and even mundane stuff like subscribing to topics, could not be done with it.

Another neat little library: MongolianBarbecue

Thu, 31 May 2018 11:43:38 +0000

The process of building larger software projects holds many small opportunities for separating out small utilities and helper libraries, and one such opportunity has again arisen 🙂

This time it’s a message queue implementation based on MongoDB: MongolianBarbecue (sounds a little bit like something with “mongo” and “queue”…. 🤓)

It’s of course not meant to be able to replace real message brokers and queueing systems, but if you’re in a tight spot, and all you have is MongoDB, then it might just save the day! 🤠

Tababular update

Tue, 08 May 2018 11:39:27 +0000

This is just a tiny update about the nifty little library that is Tababular, because I enjoy using it so much, and I think more people should be using it too 🙂

The latest prerelease (3.0.0-b02) adds .NET Standard 2.0 as a target, and it has had a make-over making it appear more spacey, and therefore easier to decode visually:

+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| FirstColumn | SecondColumn | ThirdColumn |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| r1 | hej | hej igen |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+
| r2 | hej | hej igen |
+-------------+--------------+-------------+

Last but not least, it has had its reflection routines implemented using the brilliant FastMember library, thus making it easier on your CPU 😊

Fleet Manager 2 is out

Tue, 01 May 2018 22:44:32 +0000

So… we’ve been pretty busy here at Rebus FM, building the 2nd incarnation of our Fleet Manager product (which is actually the 5th or the 7th rewrite of the frontend, depending on how you count it… but who cares?!).

We celebrated Labour Day by working even harder, which means that it’s available now! We just call it Version 2, but if you have been using the old Fleet Manager, you can probably see that it looks a little different:

Fleet Manager screenshots

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 23:02:45 +0000

To whet your appetite as a Rebus user, who is eager to one-up your game, I have posted a bunch of screenshots here on the Fleet Manager page.

While Fleet Manager is still in development and is nowhere near finished yet, it can still be quite useful to provide an overview over what is running and what is not.

If you are interested in getting access, please go consider the Rebus Pro offering – it includes a 24h support agreement in addition to instant cloud-hosted Fleet Manager access.

Rebus Pro

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:37:43 +0000

It took a couple of iterations to figure this out, but finally it has become clear which shape the commercial Rebus offering is going to take.

Say hello to REBUS PRO! 🙂

Rebus Pro is

Fleet Manager (either cloud-hosted SaaS or on-prem BYOH*)
24h support agreement
Access to private Slack channel

accessible by subscription (monthly, with savings for 3 or 6 months commitment).

Please shoot an email to hello@rebus.fm if you are interested in hearing more 🙂

Rebus 4 is out!

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 09:16:06 +0000

It only took 23 beta versions to get there 🙂

The cool thing about Rebus 4 is that it targets both .NET 4.5 and .NET Standard 1.3, making it possible to run Rebus endpoints on all server platforms that matter. In fact, I know of people who at this point have been running quite a lot of Rebus on AWS… On Linux! In Docker containers!

Most integration packages have been updated too, and almost all of them are supported on .NET Core as well, so you should go ahead and try it out.

Rebus and .NET Core

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 17:43:22 +0000

.NET Core is Microsoft’s new incarnation of .NET, where many things have been changed to be able to accommodate future needs for (primarily server side) application development. This is also the biggest change ever in the .NET world that is not backwards compatible!

For a long time we have had the ability to take an old .NET 2.0 DLL and plop it down next to our other DLLs, and then we would be able to use it right away. Because .NET Core is such a huge change (i.e. it uses a radically re-engineered runtime), that is no longer possible.

Check out Debaser

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 10:00:35 +0000

In case you are using Microsoft SQL Server, you may have tried writing a MERGE (...) statement…. did you think it was fun? 🙂

I think MERGE statements are not fun at all, but from time to time it IS necessary to execute a performant UPSERT-type of operation.

Maybe you also know that the fastest way to execute a huge number of upserts is to

create a custom table data type
create a stored procedure that executes the MERGE statement, using the data type as its input type
STREAM rows to the stored procedure via a table in tempdb

which can be pretty tedious to code.

Rebus 3 is out

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 07:10:37 +0000

Happy New Year!

This is just to let you know that Rebus 3 is out 🙂

The version was bumped to 3 because IAdvancedApi and IDataBus have been extended with more methods, and there are some changes around how to manually create transactions when sending messages outside of message handlers.

It is absolutely 100% wire-compatible with Rebus 2!

If you are interested in checking out which features were added, you can go to the tag comment and see the relevant bullets from the changelog. Most notable hightlights are a synchronous bus API (which can be accessed via bus.Advanced.SyncBus) and a few extra much needed methods on IDataBus.

Rebus FM has a new address…

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:30:26 +0000

…even though we didn’t move!

The Horsens Municipality just threw at us today that our address has been changed from

~~Søndergade 15F, 2. sal~~

Søndergade 15H, 2. sal

Of course it does not matter that much these days, but in case you were planning on stopping by for a cup of coffee, Søndergade 15H, 2. sal is the place to go.

I think the address has been updated in all the relevant places. Good thing we don’t have any business cards yet 😉

Today is cake-day in the Alley…

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 14:11:34 +0000

…because Mogens has – once again, after a break that has lasted a couple of years – received the “Most Valuable Professional” award from Microsoft, a.k.a. Microsoft MVP.

Here is what a bunch of programmers look like when they are high on sugar:

Fleet Manager status

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 15:09:30 +0000

Work is ongoing with building Fleet Manager, but it is not going as fast as we would like.

However, that does not mean that there is no progress – we are working slowly, but steadily, in order to provide a truly useful tool with a sturdy backend and an acceptable frontend 🙂

If you are interested in trying it out, please go to the Fleet Manager pre-alpha sign-up page and register yourself – then we will get in touch as soon as we think we have something that is worth trying out.

Rebus 2 is out!

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 10:54:26 +0000

I am happy to announce that Rebus 2 has finally been published with a “real version number”.

After many year of notorious unwillingness to bump the version to something binding (i.e. >= 1.0), Rebus is now out in version 2.0.1, accompanied by its > 30 integration packages.

This means that all APIs are now stable, and users can rely on pulling down only non-breaking changes when they update packages within the v2 range.

Rebus roadmap

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 11:43:19 +0000

Rebus 2 has been in development for about 1,5 years now, and it has been used in production for at least one year by myself and many others… and by “Rebus 2”, I mean Rebus versions >= 0.90.0 🙂

Sorry about the confusion

First off, I would like to apologize for the confusion about the versions. For historical reasons the versions less than and including 0.84.0 are known as “Rebus 1”, and versions greater than and including 0.90.0 are known as “Rebus 2”. If you are interested, you can see the original announcement in this blog post.

Rebus now has a data bus

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 23:29:35 +0000

The most recent addition to Rebus is a “data bus”, i.e. an implementation of the claim check pattern as described in The Good Book.

With the data bus, it has suddenly become extremely easy to transfer e.g. large CSV files from one endpoint to another, because the bus now supports creating attachments from streams, as well as opening up attachments as streams again in the receiving end.

Data bus attachments support including arbitrary metadata along with the attachment, allowing you to pass along file names, information about who made the attachment, etc.

Open source update

Wed, 18 May 2016 08:53:18 +0000

As part of daily work, little code snippets and useful bits crystallize and turn out to be so useful that it would be a shame not to share it with anyone.

Yesterday, two new small and focused projects were added to rebus-org: Owino and Swindler.

Owino

Owino is a NuGet package with OWIN extensions. At the moment, it has one single extension method: RegisterForDisposal, which is an extension method on IAppBuilder. You can use it like this:

Sometimes, it’s the little things…

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 07:37:27 +0000

Lately, I’ve been messing around with making small CLI apps quite a bit. I use it to perform various backend tasks on a couple of cloud-hosted APIs, which has turned out to be a really nice way of automating backend tasks while not needing to build any kind of graphical UI for them.

The other day I wanted to be able to manage user accounts from the command line as well, which required me to input a password to the CLI app somehow – but how to do that without passing the password on the command line?

Tababular

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 16:30:19 +0000

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to work with text, especially when you’re building command-line applications. I usually end up with a bunch of little text formatting helper methods, and recently I made one that could format a JSON array as a nice ASCII table.

I figured that this could be of use to other people as well, so I pulled it out, cleaned it up, added a few nifties, and made it into a NuGet package: Tababular (the code is on GitHub as usual).

Rebus FM and open source

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 22:02:32 +0000

It should come as no surprise that we love open source here at Rebus FM – after all, we are building our business around Rebus, which has always had pure open source pumping through its arteries.

We are doing other things too, which we plan to release on the rebus-org organization on GitHub.

If you are working with either Microsoft SQL Server or the excellent PostgreSQL in .NET, you might want to check out our latest addition to the org: Migr8.

We have stickers!!

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 16:52:42 +0000

It’s a funny thing, but it seems laptop stickers are somehow pretty important to software developers… I know, because I am certainly guilty of plastering over several company laptops too – and I don’t want any sticker on my most important tool, I carefully apply only those with which I have a special interest or relation.

It is this realization that led Rebus.fm to order a bunch of Rebus stickers – so we can give them to people who like Rebus enough to want to show it to others.

Opening reception in The Alley

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:01:57 +0000

To mark the opening of Alley 87, we are having an opening reception on February the 12th at 14:00.

Alley 87 is my friend Claus’ new shared office space, in which there are still a few desks available.

Friends, relatives, colleagues (current as well as former), and business connections are welcome.

There will be tapas and a tap that dispenses beer.

Office in the alley

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 19:14:08 +0000

To improve focus – and to reduce the risk of me, ending up sitting at home in my underpants with a huge beard – I have moved into my old friend Claus’ shared office space, Alley 87.

This also gives me an opportunity to meet some of the local Horsens entrepreneurs, which has been really nice so far. At the moment we are four startups sharing the office.

Rebus passed 300 stars on GitHub

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 13:38:16 +0000

I’m not sure this actually qualifies as “news”, but I still think it means something 🙂 Rebus has always been a developer-centric messaging library, so having received these small stamps of approval from more than 300 developers is a pat on the back which I (and Rebus’ more than 30 contributors) happily accept.

It’s alive!

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 14:48:11 +0000

This is the first day of 2016, and Rebus Fleet Management a.k.a. rebus.fm is alive!

While this might seem a little bit cryptic, I do not have that much information to give at the moment. Stay tuned – we have some great stuff coming up 🙂