.NET Foundation July/August 2020 Update
Here's the July/August 2020 .NET Foundation update. Every other month, we'll give you a quick overview of the .NET Open Source landscape, including top project news, events, community links and more.
General news
The .NET Foundation GitHub org (https://github.com/dotnet-foundation) will require 2FA enabled starting on September 15th. Anyone that does not have 2FA enabled on their account at that time will be automatically removed from the org. Please see the GitHub help on enabling 2FA on your account.
Board Elections Update
The .NET Foundation just completed it's second annual election and elected a new board of directors. The current board consists of Layla Porter, Shawn Wildermuth, Jeff Strauss, Rodney Littles, II, Beth Massi, Bill Wagner, and Javier Lozano. Claire Novotny has been working with the new board on the transition. The new board formed an Executive Committee to review the tools and processes it uses to collaborate so it can maintain and increase momentum.
.NET Virtual User Groups
The .NET Foundation launched a brand new page for .NET Meetups making it easier to find meetups, get started, and find resources. Additionally, Jon Galloway and James Montemagno worked with the outreach committee to spearheaded a .NET Foundation initiative called the .NET Virtual User Group that launched fully this month. The Virtual User Groups enables developers to find .NET user groups around the globe that are hosting their events online that they can attend. This program helps promote existing user groups that have gone virtual, but also enables the community to take their user group online by providing streaming services. So far there have been 20 event submitted with over 500 members joining.
If you run a .NET user group, and would like to have your event open to a wider audience, sign up at the .NET Virtual User Group page. A list of upcoming Virtual User Groups to join is also there and you can catch recordings of past events on our YouTube playlist.
Member resources
We'd like to make our members aware of some marketing resources you can take advantage of.
- Help spread .NET Foundation's message: Take a look at the .NET Foundation slides and use them in your presentations and events.
- Promote your .NET open source content, events, project news: If you'd like to promote something on the .NET Foundation social channels, fill out the amplification request issue template on our content repo and we'll get you scheduled.
- Write a guest blog post or submit a video to our YouTube: If you would like to propose creating content like a guest blog post or video, fill out the content creation request issue template on our content repo and we'll work with you on getting your content created.
.NET branding guidelines
Microsoft released updated .NET branding guidelines on GitHub github.com/dotnet/brand. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a framework for communicating with the .NET developer community and establishing a consistent brand identity. This not only includes the logo & typeface but also consistent messaging, terminology, fun illustrations and presentation templates you can use.
Events
"The Maintainers" Video Series Needs You
Shawn Wildermuth is putting together a short video series about open source maintainers. You can view the existing episodes (with Brad Wilson of xUnit fame; and Jimmy Bogard of AutoMapper) by visiting the YouTube Playlist. If you're interested in being a part of the series, please contact Shawn on His Website.
.NET Conf 2020 dates announced: November 10-12!
.NET Conf is a free, three day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. This year .NET 5.0 will launch at .NET Conf 2020! See the website for more information and save the date! www.dotnetconf.net
We're also planning our next .NET Conf: "Focus" event, where we continue focusing on specific .NET topics. July 30 we will present a full day of sessions for .NET Conf: Focus on Microservices with some very special guests! Learn more: focus.dotnetconf.net
.NET Foundation Project Updates
Steeltoe 3.0 GA is now available!
Steeltoe is an application framework, built on the .NET interfaces, that provides libraries for .NET Framework and .NET Core developers in order to build cloud-native applications.
In the Steeltoe 3.0 release, we have made some big changes:
- We made the Steeltoe libraries more platform agnostic to allow for better extensibility into other platforms. So, we took the initial step of creating abstractions for our core components. This will allow future extensibility for our libraries and grow the community into other areas
- We redirected our focus to support only .NET Core. This decision was based on the direction the Microsoft .NET team is taking the project and to support our users moving forward. We will still be supporting .NET Framework in our 2.x release line
- We added and renamed many of the packages to support our new features and to provide a consistent package naming
- We also added some great new features, and here are some of the highlights
- Automatic wiring and configuration of Messaging APIs with RabbitMQ
- Kubernetes support for configuration (ConfigMap and Secrets) and service discovery using Kubernetes .NET Client
- Added Health Groups for
readinessandlivenessendpoints which are grouped under the/healthendpoint - Metrics now uses
EventSourceandEventCounter, along with a new prometheus exporter that now uses OpenTelemetry metrics packages - Distributed tracing library now has new exporters and updated internal libraries from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry
- Pluggable architecture for Service Discovery (Consul, Eureka, and Kubernetes)
- New Connector for CosmosDB
- The
/heapdumpactuator endpoint now supports heap dumps on Linux - Circuit Breaker using Hystrix now using the Prometheus endpoint for easier consumption of events on Prometheus supported services
- Added mTLS support and service to service authentication using rotating certificates
A lot of time and effort went into this release and we look forward to hearing ideas and feedback from the community.
New Projects
The .NET Foundation would like to welcome the following projects that joined in July and August!
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MahApps.Metro MahApps.Metro is a free open-source framework that allows developers to cobble together a better UI for their own WPF applications with minimal effort, Supporting .NET Framework and .NET Core. It overrides the default style of all common WPF controls and gives them a modern look. MahApps.Metro also includes some custom controls based on concepts from Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Window 10 (UWP) Apps. |
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Verify Verify is a snapshot tool that simplifies the assertion of complex data models and documents. Verify is called on the test result during the assertion phase. It serializes that result and stores it in a file that matches the test name. On the next test execution, the result is again serialized and compared to the existing file. The test will fail if the two snapshots do not match: either the change is unexpected, or the reference snapshot needs to be updated to the new result. When snapshots do not match, the difference is automatically displayed in a diff tool. |
New Releases
Linq2Db
This is a major upgrade from the existing 2.x versions. Major highlights:
IAsyncEnumerable<T>support- Linked Server support (cross-server database queries are now supported across all platforms where available)
- Better Eager load support (reduced query count, performance improvement)
- Query filters (convenient way to automatically filter data for all queries affecting a table)
- Support for ROLLUP and CUBE statements
- OUTPUT statements are now supported on INSERT and DELETE statements on SQL Server
- General performance and memory use enhancements in all areas
- Misc. improvements to database providers
We are also happy to announce that Shane Krueger and Stuart Turner have joined the linq2db team.
Full details are available here
NUnit
Documentation project
We're grateful to have Sean Killeen join us as lead of the documentation project. He put in a lot of effort to modernize the NUnit documentation, to great effect as you can see at https://docs.nunit.org! The docs are now built with docfx. They are integrated with the website, have full-text search, and have edit links on each page where you can submit a PR easily. We look forward to seeing your suggestions and contributions!
NUnit VSTest adapter
3.17.0 has a new StopOnError setting, the ability to set data file paths and line numbers, a major bugfix to show console output properly, and other fixes.
4.0.0-alpha.1 fixes some of the more complex issues, such as working with explicit tests and significant performance improvements. We would really appreciate it if you give this alpha a spin and report whatever you find back to us.
NUnit Analyzers
0.3 improved the documentation of all the diagnostics. It also added new diagnostics for proper usage of string constraints, ContainsConstraint, Does.Contain, and Contains.Item, and the TestCaseSource attribute.
0.4 adds 13 new diagnostics and codefixes for asserts in the classical model such as Assert.Greater, Assert.IsNotEmpty, and Assert.IsNotInstanceOf. We have also improved the handling of asserts against constants and variables of type Task. In addition, we now properly handle ValueSourceAttribute and test methods decorated with both a TestAttribute and a TestCaseSourceAttribute/TestCaseAttribute. We have also added a diagnostic and codefix to ensure that test methods are public.
Please try out the latest and continue to let us know what you'd like to see!
NUnit Console and Engine
3.12.0-beta1 is the first beta release of the NUnit Console able to run .NET Core tests. In addition to this, this release also contains a number of bug fixes, improvements when running on Mono and significant refactoring work towards the goal of creating an engine able to run tests on a wider range of .NET platforms.
We're particularly interested in this beta release being tested by users of the .NET Core console and users running tests on Mono. Please feedback any issues to the nunit-console repository.
Meetups
Looking for speakers to go deep on AWS?
Would your user group / meetup appreciate hearing about .NET on AWS from an AWS .NET developer advocate? The team of longtime .NET developers would be thrilled to join your virtual user group to chat about the latest for .NET in the cloud.
Here's a list of example topics:
- Overview of .NET on AWS: AWS has over a decade supporting .NET on the cloud. We'll provide an overview of all the support you might not know existed, such as free tools for Visual Studio, PowerShell, Azure DevOps, etc.
- Building serverless with .NET: The future is now for serverless, and AWS is ensuring .NET is vibrant in that future. We'll show you how anybody can get started and take advantage of the speed and ease of using serverless with .NET.
- Infrastructure as .NET: Why learn JSON or YAML to build on the cloud if you can just use .NET? Learn how to model and provision cloud resources in .NET with the open source AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
- PowerShell on AWS: AWS supports PowerShell and makes it easy to manage your AWS resources in a PowerShell scripting environment. We'll show you all the things you can easily do on AWS with PowerShell, including native support for serverless.
- Something else? What are you interested in hear about? Blazor? ML? Reach out and let us know.
You can contact the .NET developer advocacy team at aws-dotnetfdn-interest-open@amazon.com. Cheers!
Sponsored Meetups
Our .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups are continuing to grow worldwide. Here are some quick stats:*
- 366 Groups
- 66 Countries
- 311K Members
Our .NET Meetup Pro group helps developers find your group, as well as get involved with local events like .NET Conf Local. If your meetup hasn't joined yet, you can right here.
