.NET 5 RC1 is coming soon

Ok so technically this isn't "released" yet but David Fowler of the .NET team shared this photo in a tweet that shows two interesting tidbits, .NET 5 preview 7 is the last preview (AKA 'alpha') release and .NET 5 (Version 5.0.100) RC1 is coming soon. The other interesting tidbit is the 'master' branch (poor naming choice) is .NET 6.0.x, and at least as of this moment .NET 6 is slated for November 2021.

Microsoft Ignite is September 22-24th, 2020, and is Free.

Sign up here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite

DevIntersection is hosting a 2-day series of workshops on .NET:

https://virtual.devintersection.com/#!/ is hosting a virtual 2-day series of workshop for the corporate friendly price of $199 on October 26th and October 27th 2020. Speakers include some pretty big names in the .NET space, including the Gu (sigh. Fine, "Scott Guthrie"), Kimberly Tripp, , Carl Franklin, Michelle Bustamente, and Scott Hunter.

Each workshop is $199 and for that you also get access to the free keynotes. I signed up for the keynotes, and understand that if you do, you can be entered to win an XBox or a free workshop

Microsoft's Ignite conference is September 22-24, 2020, and is free. The subtitle of the conference is "Empowering the technical community to help customers innovate and rebuild in a changing world" which roughly translates to "Build new &$@#, get paid". Registration opens September 3rd, 2020.

Looks like CSharpForMarkup is staying in Xamarin Forms 5

do you ever see those fight videos on youtube that start just a few seconds too late so you don't know what caused it and you're left reading the comments to figure out what the hell is going on? This is like that, but on Github.

Anyway, turns out after the team was going to take out CSharpFormarkup support out of Xamarin Forms 5 and move it to .NET 6 (MAUI), the loud voices on Github convinced them to keep it in.

C# for Markup allows a programmer to write C# markup instead of XAML for Xamarin forms. Looks neat. Incidentally, it was the author of C#ForMarkup that let me know about this on twitter.

EFCore updates -- Many to Many is in the daily builds

You know an ORM is nascent when Many-to-Many support is just landing. I remember when EFCore was billed as a lightweight alternative to EF6. There's no doubt that Entity Framework 6 was plagued by three different ways to do the same thing with teams ending up mixing and matching and driving each other crazy. The hope is the EFCore team keeps their eye on the ball and keeps a unified focus on what the API should look like for EFCore. Given that Microsoft's bread is buttered by large enterprises that hate change, I'm not holding my breath, however.

Emotions we have but don't can't explain

This is still messing me up.

Scott Hanselman releases a video explaining the .NET Ecosystem

If you're new to .NET (or even if you aren't) this video by Scott Hanselman explains the .NET ecosystem in all its 20 year sprawling majesty in a youtube video.

Tempted to make a TikTok. Let's GO!*.

The .NET Team releases a deep dive into how .NET is built and released

This is a follow-up to the public twitter statement that .NET daily builds aren't available when there are undisclosed security fixes; the .NET went through their entire build process. On a personal note, I made it through after a two-drink minimum. It also brings to sharp relief that .NET will always have Microsoft as its benevolent dictator for life.

Maoni Stephens releases a 3 part series on the .NET GC on Youtube

Maoni Stephens shares how the GC works in three parts. I love these sorts of videos. I had to learn about the GC from Jeffrey Richter's "CLR via C#" book (back when there was only 1 edition), and now we can learn this stuff on Youtube. There's a little bit of jealousy, but mostly I'm grateful for people who take the time to share this stuff.

Mads Torgerson addresses the viral "stuff I wish C# had but doesn't" tweet

Mads went to twitter to address the tweet that made it on the Orange Site that detailed some changes the author wishes C# had. Mads wrote:

 This is a great list of useful features missing from C#. They aren't fundamental flaws and could all be addressed; many are already on the radar for future versions. E.g. primary constructors are planned for C# 10.0, and could then be a building block for object expressions.

I'm not really one to ask about all these new features because I'd be perfectly happy with C# 5. Some of the newer features are rather nice; but I don't think fundamental tinkering with the syntax of a language is a great way to maintain language cohesiveness. Call me old fashioned.

Rick Brewster opines on what neat things you could do if we could get rid of the .Count property for certain collections:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1295936199345844224.html

Did you know the ASP.NET community team holds a weekly Standup?

I'm not sure it's actually a standup but naming is hard. Anyway, you can check it weekly, here.

Proposal to allow Wildcard using statements

If you've used Python or TypeScript, you've seen this sort of approach when importing modules from a third-party library. Dave mentions it as a way to handle the fact that some types of utility methods (like extension methods) should really be at the top level, even though organizationally, Visual Studio loves it when your namespaces reflect your folder structure, and penalizes you with red squigglies when you don't. It's an interesting proposal, and I'm going to keep an eye on it.

System.Text.Json getting more love for .NET 5.

After Microsoft bought out Newtonsoft and its author, it immediately set to replacing NewtonSoft.Json with it's own System.Text.Json (incidentally, I'm not clear as to whether James Newton-King worked on System.Text.Json), and for .NET 5 it appears System.Text.Json is getting some much needed additions. It even has