Here's the October edition of the .NET Foundation newsletter. Every month, we'll give you a quick overview of the .NET Open Source landscape, including top project news, events, community links and more.

This month's newsletter includes:

• News from .NET Foundation member projects
• Visual Studio Live keynote
• .NET Meetup news

As always, these are available both on our blog and via e-mail: Sign up to get the .NET Foundation Update via e-mail

.NET Foundation Project News

NUnit Framework 3.11.0 Release

NUnit framework 3.11.0 was released this month, including the features highlighted in last month's newsletter. NUnit VSTest adapter 3.11.0 was just released also! One of the fixes is that Mono.Cecil will no longer be overwritten in the test project, unblocking the testing of code that depends on Mono.Cecil. The NUnit team is considering dropping the .NET Framework 2.0 build of NUnit in the next release. We are eager to hear from anyone who may be affected—please join the discussion at https://github.com/nunit/nunit/issues/3070. Thank you!

DNN Summit

DNN Summit is coming up in February 2019 with Jon Galloway as the keynote speaker!

Windows Community Toolkit 5.0

The Windows Community Toolkit graduated to version 5.0. This update introduces the WindowsXamlHost control and wrapped UWP controls for WPF and Windows Forms, new TabView control for UWP, and Weibo .NET Standard service. Read more here.

Visual Studio Live! San Diego Keynote

.NET Foundation Secretary Beth Massi and Executive Director Jon Galloway presented a keynote at Visual Studio Live! San Diego titled .NET Today and Tomorrow on October 9. Visual Studio Magazine did a great write-up of the keynote - take a look!

Thanks @dramel for the awesome writeup on @VSMdev featuring our #VSLive Keynote from @BethMassi and @jongalloway - check it out! #microsoft #dotnet #developertraining https://t.co/yu8UGLg7cq pic.twitter.com/UJGEnqGZww

— Visual Studio Live! (@VSLive) October 10, 2018

Meetups

Our .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups continued to see rapid growth month, with lots of in-person events for our .NET Conf Local Events series. Here are some quick stats:

• 233 Groups (up 25 this past month)
• 50 Countries
• 141K Members (added 15K in the past 30 days!)

We've also started sending newsletters to Meetup organizers, including some links for some free swag for their groups. If your meetup hasn't joined yet, you can right here.

Connect with the .NET Foundation online

The .NET Foundation is on Facebook now. Please like our page! We'll post regular updates and interesting things happening with .NET to share.

The .NET Foundation is also on YouTube. Watch community standups and design reviews as well as code-focused shows and interviews across our multiple playlists.

Remember to Subscribe!

Please sign up to get the .NET Foundation Update via e-mail. Don't worry, we want to keep these short, interesting, and low-noise, so we won't overload your e-mail.

We're really excited to announce that Infer.NET is joining the .NET Foundation!

Infer.NET is model-based machine learning system for .NET, developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It's a mature and widely used system, as it's been developed since 2004, and is the machine learning engine in a number of Microsoft products in Office, Xbox and Azure. A recent example is TrueSkill 2 – a system that matches players in online video games. Implemented in Infer.NET, it is running live in the bestselling titles Halo 5 and Gears of War 4, processing millions of matches.

But in an age of abundance of machine learning libraries, what sets Infer.NET apart from the competition? Great question, and well answered by the Infer.NET team's post announcing they're joining the .NET Foundation:

Infer.NET enables a model-based approach to machine learning. This lets you incorporate domain knowledge into your model. The framework can then build a bespoke machine learning algorithm directly from that model. This means that instead of having to map your problem onto a pre-existing learning algorithm that you've been given, Infer.NET actually constructs a learning algorithm for you, based on the model you've provided.

Want to know more? Start with the announcement post from the Infer.NET team, then check out their Tutorials, Examples, and User Guide. 

Microsoft announced a couple weeks ago that they're participating in this year's Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source software. Launched as a partnership between DigitalOcean and GitHub in 2014, it rallies a global community of contributors, with last year's event drawing more than 30,000 participants!

This October, Microsoft will recognize anyone who submits a pull request between October 1^st and 31^st to one of their open source projects with a special limited-edition T-shirt. This of course includes all of our Microsoft contributed .NET open source projects. Take a particularly good look at the "up-for-grabs" labeled issues in these repos. The team has labeled the issues this way that are great for our community contributors to work on first.

Code and documentation contributions are welcome. Explore the GitHub repos, find something that interests you, and submit your first (or 100th) pull request.

For information on how to participate and claim your T-shirt, see the OpenAtMicrosoft blog for details. Make sure you read the contribution rules, including filling in the form! If you have questions, post them as issues on the Hacktoberfest GitHub repo or tweet @OpenAtMicrosoft with hashtag #hacktoberfest.

Happy Hacktoberfest!