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Microsoft .NET Conf: Focus on Microservices
Yesterday, the third edition of the .NET Conf: Focus series took place, this time featuring microservices development with .NET. The event targeted developers of all stripes, with live coding demonstrations and comprehensive coverage on related concepts and tools. The focus conferences are free, one-day livestream events featuring speakers from the community and .NET product teams.
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C# 9: Minor Improvements for Lambdas
Lambdas will be getting a small upgrade in C# 9 with two new features: discard parameters and static anonymous functions. Neither will change the way code is written, but they do clarify the developer’s intent.
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C# 9: Range Operators in Switch Constructs and Pattern-Matching Expressions
Since C# was first introduced, developers have complained about the lack of a range operator in switch constructs. This made switches far less useful in C# than they were in VB. As part of the pattern-matching enhancements for C# 9, this limitation has been addressed.
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C# 9: New `and`, `or`, and `not` Keywords for Pattern Matching
Though it may sound like our occasional April Fools Day joke, C# 9 is looking to add `and`, `or`, and `not` to its list of keywords. Specifically, for use in pattern matching.
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MSMQ and .NET Core
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) is currently not available for .NET Core. While other message queuing systems are generally preferred, many enterprise applications were based on MSMQ and this creates a problem for teams looking to migrate from .NET Framework to .NET Core or the upcoming .NET 5. But a recent pull request for Reference Source may change the situation.
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Microsoft's ZeRO-2 Speeds up AI Training 10x
Microsoft open-sourced Zero Redundancy Optimizer version 2 (ZeRO-2), a distributed deep-learning optimization algorithm that scales super-linearly with cluster size. Using ZeRO-2, Microsoft trained a 100-billion-parameter natural-language processing (NLP) model 10x faster than with previous distributed learning techniques.
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Pylance Is a New Python Language Server for Visual Studio Code
Microsoft has announced Pylance, a new language server for Python aimed to help programmers write better Python code and improve IntelliSense and Visual Studio Code support for the language. Pylance will eventually replace Microsoft Python Language Server.
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C# Futures: Null Check Operator
In the June 24th C# Language Design Meeting, Microsoft made a subtle change to the parameter null checking syntax. By changing it from “Type parameterName!” to “Type parameterName!!” they effectively introduced a new ‘null check operator’.
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Microsoft Releases gRPC-Web for .NET
Last week, Microsoft released a production-ready implementation of the gRPC-Web protocol for .NET. Initially supported as an experimental feature, the component is now part of the grpc-dotnet project. The new component makes gRPC usable in the browser, allowing web applications to communicate directly with gRPC services without using an HTTP server as a proxy.
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MAUI: a Multi-Platform App UI for .NET
Last month, during the 2020 edition of Build, Microsoft announced the roadmap for .NET MAUI, a multi-platform framework for building native device applications. The new framework comes as an evolution of Xamarin.Forms, providing native features for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
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C# 9: Type Inference for the New Keyword
In many situations, there is only one possible type allowed in a given place. And yet C# still requires you to explicitly list the type. Now that the Target-typed `new` expression proposal has been adopted into C# 9, such boilerplate code will no longer be necessary.
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C# 9: Simplified Parameter Null Validation
Simplified parameter null validation has been promoted to a C# 9 feature. This narrowly tailored feature reduces the amount of code needed to validate non-null parameters to a single character in the function signature.
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C# 9: Partial Method Enhancements for Source Generators
Source Generators in C# 9 will allow compiler-extensions to inspect code and then inject additional source code at compile-time. This injected code is then incorporated into the very same assembly that was being compiled. In order to facilitate this capability, Microsoft is removing most of the restrictions on Partial Methods.
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After MS-DOS, Microsoft Now Open Sources GW-Basic
Microsoft released on GitHub the original 8088 assembly language sources for its interpreter for GW-BASIC 1.0, a dialect of the BASIC programming language released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles. After re-open-sourcing MS-DOS, Microsoft proceeds with releasing GW-BASIC under an MIT license due to numerous requests.
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Windows Terminal 1.0 Released with Support for Profiles, Multiple Panes, and Unicode Characters
Microsoft has moved Windows Terminal out of preview and announced the release of version 1.0. Windows Terminal includes multiple tabs, panes, customizable shortcuts, support for Unicode and UTF-8 characters, and custom themes and styles. The terminal can support PowerShell, cmd, WSL, and other command-line tools.