This past week was marked by JetBrains .NET Days Online, the first release candidate for TypeScript 4.3, new versions for Visual Studio 2019, and much more. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of May 10th, 2021.
JetBrains .NET Days Online is a two-day virtual conference aimed at .NET developers. The event featured a lot of exciting topics, starting with the first session. Andrey Dyatlov, a ReSharper software developer at JetBrains, presented a very comprehensive session on C# source generators. The session was followed by an incredibly didactic walkthrough on debugging .NET applications by Tess Ferrandez-Norlander, a developer at Microsoft. The rest of the sessions followed the same level of quality and technical depth. The videos will be available soon on the event page.
Microsoft released TypeScript 4.3 RC (release candidate). This will be the last release before the general availability (GA) of TypeScript 4.3, which also means there will be no further changes apart from critical bug fixes. The release candidate can be downloaded via NuGet.
The Visual Studio team also released new previews for Visual Studio 2019 for Windows (v16.10 Preview 3) and Mac (v8.10 Preview 3). The Mac release contains several fixes related to performance issues and other updates: .NET Core SDKs (5.0.203 and 3.1.409, addressing a vulnerability issue), Mono (6.12.0.140, addressing a Big Sur issue), and Xamarin.Forms templates. The Windows release includes a new version of the MSVC compiler toolset (now C++20 feature-complete), improvements to the Git Productivity tools, and several bug fixes. There were also stable releases for the current versions of Visual Studio 2019 on Windows (16.9.5) and Mac (8.9.9). The Mac version only received the same .NET SDKs update as the preview release. The Windows version included bug and vulnerability fixes and support for Xcode 12.5.
The .NET team also released the .NET May 2021 updates, which include new .NET SDK and Runtime versions (v5.0.6, v3.1.15, and v2.1.28) for Windows, macOS, and Linux, for x86, x64, Arm32, and Arm64. The new versions include bug and vulnerability fixes. Concurrently, the team also released quality and reliability improvements related to CLR, Windows Forms, and WPF. The Security and Quality Rollup is available via Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services, and Microsoft Update Catalog.
The Steeltoe team released the first candidate for Steeltoe 3.1.0. Steeltoe - an open-source project - is a set of libraries for developing cloud-native .NET microservice applications. The new release introduces Steeltoe Stream, a framework for building message-driven microservice applications built upon other Steeltoe components. The release candidate can be downloaded from GitHub.
Telerik released a new version of its popular .NET UI toolbox - Telerik & Kendo UI R2 2021. The latest release includes Telerik UI for WinUI, Telerik UI for Blazor, and many improvements for the existing .NET and JS components.
Other releases this week include a maintenance release for Akka.NET (v1.4.20), FsAutoComplete (v0.46), and SmokeMe! (v2.1). Akka.NET is a professional-grade port of the Akka distributed actor framework to .NET. The FsAutoComplete project (FSAC) provides a backend service for rich editing or intellisense features for editors (Visual Studio Code, Emacs, Vim, and Neovim). SmokeMe! is a convention-based dotnet plugin that will automatically expose all your declared smoke tests behind a /smoke resource in your API. A smoke test is preliminary integration testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to, for example, reject a future software release.