This past week was marked by the release of Giraffe 5.0, updates to the .NET Framework, a new version of Azure SDK, and more. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of May 17th, 2021.
It has been a slow week for Microsoft - which is understandable, considering that this year's edition of Microsoft Build starts tomorrow. However, there were still some important releases - such as the cumulative update for .NET Framework, which addressed performance issues in the CLR, a few bugs in WPF, and included an update to allow .NET Framework 4.8 to negotiate TLS 1.3 (in the case the underlying OS supports it).
The Azure team also released a new version of the Azure SDK, which included updates to Event Grid, Identity, and Service Bus for .NET. The new SDK also contains two interesting initial releases for .NET developers: Azure Attestation and Azure Mixed Reality Authentication. The Microsoft Azure Attestation (MAA) service is a unified solution for remotely verifying the trustworthiness of a platform and the integrity of the binaries running inside it. Azure Mixed Reality Authentication supports exchanging Mixed Reality account credentials for an access token from the STS that can be used to access Mixed Reality services. You can find all .NET features included in this release here.
Another important update from Microsoft was a new version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (v2.1.3). This is an especially important update for developers still migrating from .NET Framework since Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is the long-term replacement for System.Data.SqlClient. The update addresses race condition issues between SinglePhaseCommit and TransactionEnded events and fixes a wrong data blending problem in specific scenarios.
Giraffe also released its first major version since last year (v5.0). Giraffe is a functional ASP.NET Core micro web framework for building rich web applications, written in F#. The new version exclusively targets `net5.0`, dropping support for all other target frameworks. Other features in the new version include a major restructuring on the serialization modules, new routing handlers, and more. You can find more details about the new features in the cumulative release notes (since version 5.0.0-alpha-001).
Uno Platform released a brand-new documentation site and a health check tool for developers. The tool - called uno-check - is similar to the flutter doctor tool for Flutter, and its objective is to make it easier to develop cross-platform Uno-powered applications. You can find more about uno-check here.
Another interesting release from this week was AvaloniaUI (v0.10.5). (Self-)considered a spiritual successor to WPF, AvaloniaUI is a cross-platform XAML-based UI framework written (mostly) in C#. Although being in its very early stages, its maintainers claim that it is already ready for general-purpose desktop app development. More information about AvaloniaUI can be found on its official website.
Richard Lander, program manager at Microsoft, released two new posts in his series of "conversations" - which are, in essence, discussions with multiple team members about a specific topic. The series started last month with a conversation about crossgen2 (a tool that provides ahead-of-time compilation), and two new conversations were published this week: one about PGO (profile-guided optimization) and another about ready to run (the native executable code format for .NET). The discussions are rich, targeting technical experts and .NET developers who want to know more about a specific topic.