This past week was marked by the release of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.10, Windows ML NuGet package 1.8.0, a Visual Studio Code extension for Tye, Oqtane 2.1, and more. InfoQ examined these and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of May 31st, 2021.
Following the recent releases from Build, Microsoft released a new version of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac (v8.10). The new release includes support for .NET 6 Preview 4 (also released during Build), updated dialogs written using native macOS Cocoa, and performance improvements for solution load and project build. With the new release, Mac developers can now have access to Microsoft's new approach for building minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core (as part of .NET 6 Preview 4). Visual Studio for Mac 8.10 can be downloaded here.
Microsoft released a new version of Project Tye (v0.7) in the form of a Visual Studio Code extension. Tye is a developer productivity tool for developing, testing, and deploying microservices and distributed applications. The new extension includes views and features for managing, debugging, and running Tye applications, and it can be downloaded from the Visual Studio marketplace.
The Windows AI team released new versions for the Windows ML (v1.8.0) and DirectML (v1.5.1) NuGet packages. The new version of WindowsML features a new API SetIntraOpThreadSpinning to enable finer-grained control over thread spinning versus context switching. DirectML 1.5.1 includes features such as support for ARM/ARM64 machines, new operators, and performance improvements.
Another interesting release from this week was Oqtane v2.1. Oqtane is a modular application framework for Blazor. The most important feature in this release is the support for multiple databases, including SQL Server (and LocalDB), SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Oqtane 2.1 can be downloaded from GitHub.
NBomber - a very flexible open-source load testing framework for F# and C# - also released a new major version (v2.0), the first in more than one year. The new release includes many UI/UX and performance improvements, a new statistics module, and a new API for test scripts. NBomber can be downloaded from GitHub.
Other interesting releases this week include Cake for Rider (v1.0), Gremlinq (v8.6.0), TheBFG (v1.1.0), and SecurityDriven.Core (v1.0.2). Cake for Rider is - as the name implies - a Cake plugin for JetBrain's Rider. Gremlinq (ExRam.Gremlinq) is a .NET object-graph-mapper for Apache TinkerPop™ Gremlin enabled databases. The BFG is A cloud-native .NET unit / integration / load testing tool that clusters automatically. SecurityDriven.Core is a faster, thread-safe, cryptographically strong .NET replacement for Random and RandomNumberGenerator.
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 two new conversations published this week are: one about the .NET type system, and another one about .NET interop. The discussions are rich, targeting technical experts and .NET developers who want to know more about a specific topic.
