Microsoft Connect 2018 was an online event where Microsoft announced a lot of exciting news for .NET developers.
This post includes what I consider the top 5 news for C# developers.
1 - Open Sourcing of WPF, Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library
This is big!
This is the first step to great future improvements on the windows development UI technologies.
Deep inside me I hope Microsoft and the community will bring WPF to Linux and Mac so that we can create cross-platform desktop applications for all major operating systems. I see open sourcing the frameworks as the first logical step towards this possible goal.
Take a look at the projects on Github:
2 - Visual Studio 2019 Preview
Microsoft announced the first preview of Visual Studio 2019.
You can download and install it today even side-by-side to Visual Studio 2017. It's not going to mess up your development environment because the installation is completely self-contained and indipendent from other versions of Visual Studio. This makes it a lot easier to start testing the new IDE on your dev machine at work. I could not resist the temptation!
Honestly the most important thing that I am looking for in the new release is performance. Microsoft is gradually moving some of the services out-of-process and this would hopefully improve the responsivenecess of the IDE. On my initial testing, it seems a lot faster compared to VS2017 but it's also true I didn't have my usual extensions installed (like ReSharper and NCrunch).
It's not just about performance.
VS2019 now contains Visual Studio Live Share in it and new features has been announced like the ability to share desktop apps and localhost during a debugging session. Awesome stuff.
Visual Studion IntelliCode also looks pretty promising as well as more refactoring capabilities that are moving Visual Studio a step closer to R#.
I am also quite excited about the new pull request experience. VS2019 allows you to do a code-review directly in the editor without having to context switch to Github.
And this is only the first preview... looking forward to see what's coming!
3. .NET Core 3.0 Public Preview
.NET Core is evolving rapidly and is supported by a very engaged community.
The biggest addition to .NET Core 3.0 is the support for WinForms and WPF. We can finally build desktop applications running on .NET Core (only on Windows for now). This means we can get all the benefits of the new runtime and APIs in our classic desktop applications.
Learn more: .NET Core 3 Preview.
4. .NET Foundation Open Membership
Microsoft is opening the governance of the .NET Foundation to anyone in the open source community and any person who has contributed to any .NET Foundation open source project is eligible to vote.
Learn more: Announcing .NET Foundation Open Membership
5. First C# 8 features
Oh yes!
I don't think C# 8 was ever mentioned in the keynote but some of the new features are available in the first preview of Visual Studio 2019.
You can try to enable Nullable Reference Types and see how many warnings the compiler throws at you. For my project at work I got 2260 warnings 🙂 How many bugs are hidden in there?
You should also be able to play with Ranges and Indices and Asynchrouns streams.
Learn more about those new features in Take C# 8.0 for a spin and learn about C# 8 in the following video.
Microsoft Connect 2018 Keynote
Watch the keynote to learn about all the other announcements including Azure, AI & Data, Internet of Things, Azure DevOps, Serverless and Containers.
Alternatively, you can find the complete list of news in The Book of News Connect 2018.
Watch the entire Microsoft Connec 2018 event
The entire streaming of the event (more than 9 hours of content) is available to watch in the following video. There is lots of goodness in there, perfect for Friday afternoon learning time.
What is the most exciting news for you?
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