This past week was marked by the announcement of Visual Studio 2022, the first 64-bit version of the popular .NET IDE. InfoQ examined this and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of April 19th, 2021.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2022 - the next major release of Visual Studio - will be a 64-bit application. According to Amanda Silver, an executive at Microsoft's Developer Division, its main process (devenv.exe) will "no longer be limited to ~4gb of memory"(sic). The announcement also included a brief list of additional features that should be expected with the new release, such as full support to .NET 6 and the Hot Reload functionality, which allows code changes to be instantly reflected in an application being debugged. Also according to Silver, Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 will be released this summer.
dotnet monitor - a diagnostics information tool, first released as "experimental" last year - is now a supported tool in the .NET ecosystem. Currently available as a preview release, the tool is available on NuGet, and it requires .NET SDK 3.1 or newer. A container image is also available on MCR. The latest preview includes additional egress providers (Azure Blob Storage and the local filesystem) and custom metrics configuration.
IronPython - an implementation of the Python programming language targeting the .NET Framework and Mono - released the first preview of its Python 3 implementation (v3.4.0-alpha1). The baseline for this release is Python 3.4. The runtime targets are .NET Framework 4.6, .NET Core 2.1, .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.
Other interesting releases of the week include CsCheck 2.1, FsToolkit.ErrorHandling 2.2, and Llama v0.1.6. CsCheck is a C# random testing library inspired by QuickCheck. FsToolkit.ErrorHandling is an error-handling library to work with the Result type in F#. Llama (SourceGear.Llama.Swift.Sdk) is an MSBuild SDK for compiling Swift to .NET assemblies, still at the "proof of concept" stage (according to its author's website).
Also, two community events took place this week: the monthly WinUI Community Call and a special edition of the .NET Community Standup series focused on Entity Framework Core (both hosted by Microsoft). Besides the regular updates, the WinUI Community Call featured a presentation from the .NET MAUI development team with an overview of the development status and a quick hands-on demonstration. The Entity Framework Core event was focused on open source contributions: the EF Core team provided a very comprehensive hands-on demonstration on how to add a feature to EF Core (if you are a developer thinking about contributing to EF Core, this presentation is definitely for you).
Launch 2021 officially opened the registration process for new participants. Launch is "an annual event hosted by the UWP Community, where developers, beta testers, translators, and users work together to Launch their new and refreshed apps." This year's edition should be particularly interesting with the release of WinUI3 (as part of Project Reunion) and .NET MAUI.