The last week of March was filled with news from the .NET community, with the release of Project Reunion 0.5, Dapr 1.1, and more. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of March 29th, 2021.
Project Reunion 0.5 was officially released this week, leaving the Preview state and moving into General Availability. Project Reunion is a set of libraries, frameworks, components, and tools that provides a unified development platform for all apps (Win32, Packaged, and UWP), targeting all the Windows 10 versions. The new release includes a stable version of the Windows UI Library version 3 (WinUI 3), the next generation of native Windows UI. With Project Reunion 0.5, developers can create brand new WinUI 3 desktop apps from scratch or migrate existing desktop apps to the new WinUI version. You can find more information about Project Reunion 0.5 in the release notes.
Dapr 1.1 was also released this week. Dapr (from "Distributed Application Runtime") is an open-source, event-driven runtime for developing event-driven distributed applications. It is composed of building blocks for common capabilities necessary in microservice applications (such as service-to-service invocation and state management) that can be used independently by the application. This is the first release since the official 1.0 announcement earlier this year, and it includes several bug fixes, new conformance tests for many pub-sub components, and new unit tests for .NET apps.
Another .NET-related release from Microsoft was the first beta of TypeScript 4.3. The new release includes improvements to template string types, new private class elements, static index signatures, and more. TypeScript 4.3 Beta can be downloaded via NuGet, npm, or from the Visual Studio marketplace. There are also packages available for Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text. Make sure that you also check the breaking changes before testing the new beta with your existing applications.
The Visual Studio team released minor updates for Visual Studio for Windows (16.9.3) and Visual Studio for Mac (8.9.4). Both releases contain many bug fixes, including a problem (Windows) related to the web.config file that's been around since Visual Studio 16.7.3 (as reported).
Another release related to Visual Studio was an update to the Angular Language Service extension, which allows ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core developers to build front-end projects with Angular. The update includes a fix for HTML tags now showing up in completion and support to the latest stable version of TypeScript (v4.2.3). The extension requires Visual Studio 16.5 or later, and it can be downloaded from the Visual Studio marketplace.
The Jupyter extension for Visual Studio Code also had a new release this week that included enhancements to the Data Viewer (including support for slicing data), multiple cell selection, and a variety of usability enhancements and bug fixes. The new release requires VS Code Insiders to be installed before it can be downloaded from the Visual Studio marketplace.
Another interesting release this week was the .NET SDK for the Serverless WorkFlow Specification, a vendor-neutral, platform-independent workflow specification that targets the serverless computing technology domain. The specification includes workflow DSL (described by JSON schemas), other SDKs (for Go and Java), and tools and extensions for tracing, observability, and diagram generation. The new .NET SDK follows the Serverless Workflow specification's latest release (v0.6, released earlier in March). Additionally to the new release, a new repository for a TypeScript SDK was created in the organization's repository, signaling the direction taken by the development team.
An interesting release from the OSS community was CUKE, a cross-platform build automation system with a Gherkin DSL for tasks such as compiling code, running unit tests, and building NuGet packages. CUKE is supported by Visual Studio Code through the Cucumber extension, and its source code is available on GitHub.
Other releases from this past week include CsCheck 2.0 and jose-jwt 3.1. CsCheck is a C# random testing library inspired by QuickCheck, and it's available on GitHub and NuGet. jose-jwt is a minimalistic zero-dependency .NET library for generating, decoding, and encrypting JSON Web Tokens. The new version introduces the JWE JSON Serialization defined in RFC 7516, and it's also available on GitHub and Nuget.