This past week was marked by the online streaming of Cloud Builders Conf and the release of Unity 2020 LTS. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of March 22th, 2021.
Cloud Builders Conf is a Ukraine-based conference targeting cloud developers using .NET and JAVA, with speakers from companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. This year's speakers included well-known names from the .NET community, such as Scott Hunter and Cecil L. Phillip - both at Microsoft. Hunter presented the first .NET session of the event, a hands-on overview on how to build cloud-native apps with .NET 5. During this session, Hunter also confirmed that this year's edition of Microsoft Build is scheduled for the end of May. Other interesting sessions in the conference included a deep dive on Dapr (presented by Phillip) and sessions on Azure services and functions. The event ended with a very interesting discussion on choreography versus orchestration, presented by Mete Atamel, developer advocate at Google.
Another interesting event this week was the second part of the monthly WinUI Community Call, hosted by Microsoft. Initially scheduled for last week, this month's edition had to be separated into two parts due to technical difficulties. In the first part of the event (streamed last week), the WinUI team presented the new WinUI 3 and discussed the new shipping process introduced with Project Reunion. The second part of the event featured a one-hour presentation and Q&A with the guests Jerome Laban and François Tanguay - respectively CTO and CEO of Uno Platform - about developing cross-platform WinUI apps with Uno.
The Unity team released Unity 2020 LTS and Unity 2021.1 Tech Stream. The LTS release is a mature build containing all tech stream releases from the previous calendar year. The Tech Stream release includes a new lifecycle model for the built-in package manager and the first features related to visual scripting, one of the top priorities for this year's releases.
Following last week's updates, Akka.NET released a new maintenance version (v1.4.18) with some non-breaking changes. You can find the release notes for this version here. Other releases of this week include a new major version of the Json.NET framework (v13.0.1) and a maintenance release for NLog (v4.7.9)
