.Net News Summary -May 17, 2021 Week

Link to the original (post date: 2021/05/24)

Last week featured the release of Giraffe 5.0, updates to the .NET Framework, and a new version of the Azure SDK. InfoQ looked into this and some minor incidents within the .NET ecosystem during the week of May 17, 2021.

It's been a low-key week for Microsoft. Understandable considering this year's Microsoft Build starts tomorrow. But still, a cumulative update to the .NET Framework that addressed performance issues with the CLR, some bugs in WPF, and an update that allowed the .NET Framework 4.8 to negotiate TLS1.3 (because the underlying OS was If it supports it) there were some important releases.

The Azure team has also released a new version of the Azure SDK. This includes updates to Event Grid, Identity and Service Bus for.NET. The new SDK also includes two interesting early releases for .NET developers: Azure Attestation and Azure Mixed Reality Authentication. The Microsoft Azure Attestation (MAA) service is an integrated solution for remotely verifying the authenticity of platforms and the integrity of binaries running within them. Azure Mixed Reality Authentication supports exchanging Mixed Reality account credentials for access tokens from STS that can be used to access Mixed Reality services. All .NET features included in this release can be viewed here.

Another significant update from Microsoft was a new version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (v2.1.3). Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is the long-term replacement for System.Data.SqlClient, so this is an especially important update for developers still migrating from the .NET Framework. This update addresses a race condition issue between SinglePhaseCommit and TransactionEnded events and fixes an incorrect data blending issue in certain scenarios.

Giraffe also released its first major version (v5.0) since last year. Giraffe is a functional ASP.NET Core micro web framework for building rich web applications written in F#. The new version targets `net5.0` only and drops support for all other target frameworks. Other features in the new version include a major restructuring of the serialization module, new routing handlers, and more. See Cumulative Release Notes (Version 5.0.0-alpha-001 and above) for more information on new features.

The Uno Platform has released a new documentation site and health check tool for developers. This tool (called uno-check) is similar to the flutter doctor tool for Flutter and its purpose is to develop cross-platform Uno-powered applications. is to facilitate You can read more about uno-check here.

Another interesting release this week was AvaloniaUI (v0.10.5). Considered the (self) spiritual successor to WPF, AvaloniaUI is a cross-platform XAML-based UI framework written (mostly) in C#. It's in a very early stage, but its maintainers claim it's already ready for general-purpose desktop app development. For more information about AvaloniaUI, visit the official website.

Microsoft program manager Richard Lander has released two new posts in his Conversations series. This is essentially a discussion with multiple team members on a particular topic. The series kicked off last month with a conversation about crossgen2 (a tool that provides pre-compilation), and two new conversations were published this week. One is about PGO (profile-guided optimization) and the other is about ready-to-run (executable code format for native .NET). The discussions are extensive and aimed at technical experts and .NET developers who want to learn more about specific topics.