This week in .NET (37)

An overview what happened in .NET this week.

This week in .NET

Last week, 12-14 September, .NET Conf 2018 happened, a 3 day virtual developer conference that was viewed all over the world. We had a lot of talks during these 3 days and below are some highlights in a random order. It was also told that the .NET Foundation also focuses on bringing developers from all over the world together. Please see the .NET Foundation site for more information about current Meetups or starting your own! .NET Conf has various events all over the world between September 12 through the end of October. See the .NET Foundation site for more information if you are interested.

.NET Conf also made me aware of the following site, https://builtwithdot.net/, which provides you with projects that are build on or for .NET. You can also provide your own projects to make them more visible to everyone.

Hereby a short list of updates and talks you should see!

.NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 announced

There are lots of improvements and updates in this release. We have:

Tiered compilation

This is a rather significant change which is now enabled by default. In 2.1 it was announced that you could enable this via a variable. The benefit of tiered compilation can be seen below (image from MSDN blog).

The baseline is .NET Core 2.1 RTM, running in a default configuration, with tiered compilation disabled. The second scenario has tiered compilation. You can see a significant request-per-second (RPS) throughput benefit with tiered compilation enabled.

ASP.NET Core 2.2 Preview 2

The previous release, preview 1, gave us lots of improvements:

Java SignalR client;
Improvements to IIS Hosting (for example, in-process hosting options);
Http/2
A health check services and middleware;
Endpoint routing;
API Controller Open API (Swagger) Analyzers & Conventions

The preview 2 improved upon this. Since the last preview we now have:

A Java SignalR client that supports Azure SignalR Service;
Problem Details support;
ASP.NET Core Modules improvements (which makes it possible to host your .NET Core application within an IIS worker process, instead of reverse-proxying)
Various templates have been updated to the latest version:
- Bootstrap 4 template has been cleaned up;
- Angular template has been updated to Angular 6;
Improvements to Web API including API security;
Improvements to the Health checker.

In other news it was announced that the Azure SignalR Service will go GA @ Ignite (the 24th of September).

The Web API improvements where shown in combination with swagger tooling and the API Analyzers. There are a lot of improvements and it was also shown in how the new API improvements work together with Http Repl. You can find most of them in this talk.

Entity Framework Core

EF Core got some major improvements mainly with the focus on a Cosmos DB provider and spatial extensions for SQL Server and SQLite providers. It's also possible to reverse engineer database views, which might be a handy feature in some cases.

We can now also use SQL Connection token authentication provided by Azure AD. This is not solely a change to EF but to the underlying SQLConnection.

Other things

In the near future, .NET Core 3, it will be possible to create .NET Core desktop applications such as WPF and WinForms using .NET Core. This is currently in the very early stages of preview, which you can try out if your interested. Using .NET Core within those types of applications will provide you, amongst other things, with the performance improvements .NET Core gives you.

We also had talk about the features of C# 7.3 If you want to read more about them, see this link.

ML.NET 0.5

At .NET Conf ML.NET 0.5 was announced. ML.NET provides you with a cross platform open source machine learning framework for .NET developers. You can find more information in the talk below or in this link.

Blazor

Well, this talk shows it all!

There are way to many things to talk about, the biggest thing being the Blazor programming model will be integrated into ASP.NET Core. The idea behind this is to run server-side on .NET Core with SignalR handling UI interaction. You can try this out in the latest preview and will become available in ASP.NET Core 3.0!

We also saw a demo of Blazor running within as an Electron desktop application, which might introduce even more lovely features for Blazor. However, the full web assembly version will however still be experimental, but who knows some day it will promote 😃.

With the introduction of templated components in the next version, you can create templates and then bind them like you do on a Grid or ListView. We'll see more of this in the next version 0.6, which is planned for somewhere in September.

If you prefer reading instead of watching the above talk, Telerik also provided a nice breakdown on the project types.

Thanks for reading!

Some highlighted video's you should see:

Xciles

C# .NET