.NET Foundation November/December 2020 Update

December 15, 2020 by Claire Novotny

Welcome to the .NET Foundation update for November & December. Every other month, we'll give you a quick overview of the .NET open source landscape and what the .NET Foundation is up to, including top project news, events, community links and more.

General news

The .NET Foundation Community Survey Launched

In November we launched a "State of .NET" survey and we're encouraging everyone in the .NET community to participate. Your feedback is very important to the .NET Foundation. It will help us understand our community needs better and prioritize the work that we do. The survey will stay open until March 31, 2021 after which the results will be made public. If you complete the survey you can enter to win a $250 gift certificate (multiple winners). Please visit our survey page and thank you to everyone that has completed it already.

.NET Foundation YouTube Channel

We've moved the .NET Community Standups from Microsoft over to the .NET YouTube Channel. This was based on community feedback requesting that we be more clear on separating content that's produced by Microsoft from the .NET Foundation and open source community. The .NET Foundation YouTube channel will continue to broadcast and promote community virtual meetups, open source project content, and .NET Foundation-related content. We hope that this makes the channel easier to navigate. Please subscribe!

.NET Foundation Speaker Directory

The .NET Foundation is building a speaker directory to discover and encourage speakers from around the world as well as provide mentors for new speakers. We invite you to add yourself to the directory, act as a mentor if you'd like, and contribute to building up the global list of community speakers.

.NET Foundation Project Updates

Project Spotlight - Oqtane

Each month Project Spotlight shines a light on an interesting open source project and its maintainers. In this iteration, .NET Foundation Marketing Committee member, Isaac Levin, speaks with the .NET Foundation Projects Committee Chair, Shaun Walker, to talk about his project Octane which recently launched version 2.0 at .NET Conf 2020.

Oqtane is a modular application framework which accelerates the development of modern digital experiences. It was architected from the ground up to utilize Blazor, a modern single-page application framework for building interactive web apps with C# and .NET. Oqtane offers advanced capabilities such as multi-tenancy, a fully dynamic page compositing model, designer friendly themes, extensibility via third party plug-in modules, a headless API, and supports Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly hosting models.

New Projects

No new projects have joined since the last newsletter, but we have a few in the pipeline that we're excited about in the new year.

.NET Foundation Committee Updates

Membership Committee

The membership committee has processed the full backlog of new member requests. If you're reading this for the first time, Welcome!

There are two other initiatives we're working on. First, we're working on defining a clear set of benefits for individuals to join the foundation. We want the foundation to provide mor clear benefits to its members. Second, we're looking at expanding what kinds of contributions should be considered to join the foundation. Our goal is to attract more members to the foundation from the .NET community at large. Follow along with our discussions at our GitHub repo.

Events

Watch .NET Conf 2020 Session Replays

.NET Conf 2020 was held November 10-12 and it was the largest one yet all because of our wonderful community. The .NET Foundation was one of the main sponsors of the event and we delivered a compressed session right after the keynote to thank the open source projects supporting .NET 5, give a quick update on some initiatives, and raise awareness about what the .NET Foundation does to a very large audience. Over the course of the three days there were almost 200,000 live views, 100 speakers delivered 80 live sessions, sponsors gave away $200,000 worth of prizes & free digital swag and best of all, .NET 5.0 is released.

If you missed it, you can still watch session replays, download the slides and demos, and grab your digital swag by visiting www.dotnetconf.net.

.NET Conf Virtual Tour

This year the .NET Foundation is supporting community-run virtual events to help spread the word about the .NET 5.0 release. We have partnered with organizers around the globe to bring you community virtual events thru January 31, 2021. Join your fellow developers in your local time zone and language to learn even more about .NET. Would you like to organize a virtual event for your community? Take a look at the "Event-in-a-box" on GitHub to help you. Let us know about your event by filling out the Virtual Community Event Request Form.

"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.

How to Get Involved

The .NET Foundation is only as good as the community that supports it. There are many ways to get involved.

Support a project

Projects, and the people behind them, are at the heart of what .NET Foundation is all about. These days, you'll find a wide variety of projects under the .NET Foundation. Can you contribute to something already in the works? Browse our projects to find out how to contribute.

Become a member

By involving people that are passionate about .NET we can create a powerful organization that furthers sustainable open source, a diverse and open community, and help evolve this growing and evolving ecosystem that we are very passionate about. If you are as passionate about the .NET ecosystem as we are, then you should consider becoming a member of the .NET Foundation. Read more about member benefits and please join to help shape the future.

Join a committee

The .NET Foundation Committees are where the vast majority of work gets done in the Foundation. The more you participate the more we can do together. Please visit the committee hub on our website to learn more and how you can get involved.

Spread the word

Help spread .NET Foundation's message. Take a look at the .NET Foundation slides and use them in your presentations and events. Members can also request promotion of their events and open source related content. See the marketing repo for details.

Buy some merch

Show off your nerd side with pride! Support the .NET Foundation by rocking some gear from our store. Check out the new items and don't forget to show them off on Twitter #dotnetlovesme.

Have some fun

Coding is better with friends, especially when they bring their own mods. As the mascot for the .NET community, dotnet-bot helps with checking pull requests on .NET repos on GitHub. Create your own coding companion by building your own custom dotnet-bot at mod-dotnet-bot.net and sharing it on Twitter #dotnetlovesme.