.NET Foundation April 2019 Update
Here's the April 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:
- Get ready for Build 2019!
- Visual Studio 2019 Launch Recap
- Visual Studio Release: Announcement Post Rollup
- .NET Product Team Announcement Posts
- .NET Foundation Project Updates
- New .NET Foundation Projects
- Meetups
As always, these are available both on our blog and via e-mail: Sign up to get the .NET Foundation Update via e-mail
Get ready for Build 2019!
Build 2019 is coming up May 6-8. Just about everything will be live streamed, so if you're not going to be there in person you can watch online. Build 2019: Save The Data And if you're there in person, stop by the .NET Open Source booth to say hi! We'll have .NET Foundation project leaders and board members there to say hi and talk about .NET open source, as well as some pretty great stickers and t-shirts... Come say hi!
Visual Studio 2019 Launch Recap
Visual Studio 2019 was released on April 2! Lots of new announcement posts, videos you may have missed and some ongoing local launch events to get in on.
Launch Event Videos
First, all the goodies from the Visual Studio 2019 Launch Event:
Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac are now available for download on https://visualstudio.com/downloads
See what makes .NET Core 3.0 such a big deal for .NET developers no matter what kind of apps you're building. See the productivity and performance improvements and innovative new ways to build and enhance your .NET applications. 
See Visual Studio 2019 in action building modern, cross-platform web apps using ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview.Visual Studio 2019 in action building modern, cross-platform web apps using ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview.
Learn how to program the next internet connected toothbrush or industrial IoT device with IoT and Visual Studio 2019.
Who needs fancy data scientists? See how you can infuse custom AI/ML into any .NET application with ease and how Visual Studio 2019 improves your debugging & development experience.
What's new in Visual Studio for Mac 2019? Find out all the new features and capabilities in the IDE and even get a glance of our product roadmap.
Visual Studio 2019 Launch Events Near You
There are still dozens of worldwide local events running through the end of June. Find one near you here.
Visual Studio Release: Announcement Post Rollup
Here are some of the top posts during the Visual Studio 2019 Launch:
- Visual Studio 2019: Code faster. Work smarter. Create the future.
- Visual Studio 2019 .NET productivity
- ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 4
- Web and Azure Tool Updates in Visual Studio 2019
- Announcing Entity Framework Core 3.0 Preview 4
- Announcing ML.NET 1.0 RC – Machine Learning for .NET
- Announcing the .NET Framework 4.8
- Announcing .NET Core 3 Preview 4
- Visual Studio 2019 for Mac is now available
.NET Product Team Announcement Posts
Lots of exciting new announcements during the rest of the month, too:
- Using .NET and Docker Together – DockerCon 2019 Update
- Blazor now in official preview!
- Updated Razor support in Visual Studio Code, now with Blazor support
- .NET Core Workers in Azure Container Instances
- .NET Core Workers as Windows Services
.NET Foundation Project Updates
BenchmarkDotNet v0.11.5 has been released!
Power plan management, better Environment Variables API and outlier messages, support modern CPU architecture names, tons of improvements and bug fixes!
DNN RC
Version 9.3.2 will release soon... the RC posted 12 days ago.
Orleans
Orleans 2.3.1 includes a few improvements, one bug fix, and batch stream API added back.
PeachPie: Progress toward full PHP compatibility
Great post from the PeachPie project on the impact the open source community has had on the project, the impact on support for popular PHP applications and frameworks (like WooCommerce, Laravel, Symfony, Drupal and more), and a look at what's next.
AutoMapper 8.1.0 Released
AutoMapper 8.1 adds a major new feature - attribute-based maps. Attribute maps let you easily declare maps on destination types when you have straightforward scenarios.
IdentityServer4 Roadmap
The IdentityServer team released a roadmap update, recapping recent releases and looking ahead to the 3.0 release (built against ASP.NET Core 3) and a 4.0 release to support ASP.NET Core 3.1 (LTS).
Using Microsoft Configuration Extensions with Steeltoe
David Dieruf explains how to choose between environment variables and external configuration servers, then explains why Steeltoe and Microsoft.Extensions are a great fit for external configuration.
Orchard Core Beta 3
Congrats to the Orchard team for releasing Orchard Core Beta 3. This release includes support for ASP.NET Core 2.2, GraphQL, support for all social authentication, decoupled and headless CMS support, and lots more.
Cake v0.33.0 released
This release sees a number of long waited features being added, including the ability to use a globbing pattern within the #load directive. As well as this, a number of improvements were included, and a number of bugs squashed. All of these are detailed below in the release notes.
Fifteen years of WiX
Wow! The WiX team is celebrating fifteen years! Congrats! Read these posts from Bob Arnson and Rob Mensching to hear about the history of this iconic .NET open source project.
Json.NET 12.0.2
A new release of Json.NET is out, adding several new features and a few bug fixes.
New .NET Foundation Projects
We're excited to welcome the following new .NET Foundation projects, with several more on the way this next month:
Introducing .NET for Apache® Spark™ Preview
At Spark + AI summit, the team announced .NET for Apache Spark. Spark is a popular open source distributed processing engine for analytics over large data sets. Spark can be used for processing batches of data, real-time streams, machine learning, and ad-hoc query.
.NET for Apache Spark is aimed at making Apache® Spark™ accessible to .NET developers across all Spark APIs. So far Spark has been accessible through Scala, Java, Python and R but not .NET.
Welcoming DotVVM to the .NET Foundation!
DotVVM is an MVVM framework for ASP.NET Core and OWIN. The DotVVM project has been under active development for almost 5 years.
In addition to providing some nice productivity features through MVVM development and controls, it also offers an incremental upgrade path for ASP.NET Web Forms applications through the DotVVM Adapter for ASP.NET WebForms.
Meetups
Our .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups are continuing to grow worldwide. Here are some quick stats:
- 291 Groups (+10 from the past month)
- 59 Countries
- 208K Members (+20K 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.
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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.
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