August 1, 2020 - .NET Foundation: Friend or Foe?

VB.NET "Not along for the ride" in .NET Core and .NET 5. Eject Mailman, eject.

For those of you that were hoping for VB.NET to get some love in .NET 5, it doesn't look like it's going to happen. This is of course causing some consternation; but overall I get it. Visual Basic was written for a time when we really thought we could make a language look like english and not be laughed out of the room. Now we know better. VB.NET has done good things; and I know a few products even today that are still written in VB.NET; but look, it's time.

Just look at the flowers, VB.NET.

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7 Preview 6 is now available

Most of us are probably on the Visual Studio stable channel, but if you like to get the previews (they're free), you can install them. Interesting to me is that this version adds support for XCode 11.6? I don't even know what this means but here we are and that sounds cool as $#&@.

Microsoft .NET team is hiring

You can apply to become a Program Manager II on the .NET team. I thought about applying, but realized "allowing everyone to be their authentic selves" probably doesn't mean "Making fun of Microsoft on a daily basis". Seriously though, if you can move to Redmond, you should think about applying. .NET is entering its best years; and Microsoft is one of the better companies to work for.

Microsoft's Roslyn team (the compiler for .NET) released a blogpost detailing productivity improvements:

The Roslyn team released a new blog post detailing tooling fixes that are in Visual Studio 2019 16.6 that you may have missed.

My favorites are the DateTime formatting changes. You no longer have to Google which combination of MMDDYYYY gets you what you want; they now provide that information in the intellisense when you use DateTime.ToString(). This is a long overdue feature and I'm glad they added it. Their code refactorings are getting better, though I still prefer Jetbrains Resharper.

.NET Foundation "State of the Foundation"

The .NET Foundation released its State of the Foundation report for 2020. They have 800 members, which is a growth of 100% from last year, and 5 corporate sponsors, as well as its plan for the coming year. I'm glad to see this sort of transparency; and while I have some reservations about the .NET Foundation; this is a step in the right direction.

They also released their budget; and this will get better, but they spent a grand total of $558 dollars on sponsorships this year. You'd hope to see that get much better, and that's the metric I'll be using to judge whether or not they're having the right impact on the .NET community.

Stack Overflow infographic:

Stack Overflow (the company) released its performance metrics for its collection of Q&A sites on stackexchange.com (What the company used to be named, but then realized that was a terrible name and changed to the same namesake as its flagship Q&A site). So anyway, if you want to know how 300+ Stack Exchanges perform, you'll want to see this.

The sheer speed of the Stack Exchange network got the Hacker News folks all in a tizzy. Any day we can tout how well .NET performs and piss off hacker news is a good day.

.NET Conf - "Focus on Microservices"

.NET Conf held an all day conference to talk microservices; and I live tweeted it. I've got some pretty nasty scars (And a few fond memories) of working with Microservices; and if that sort of thing interests you, check my live thread on it. If your architect is practicing Resume driven development or you work with really large software teams, you should watch the videos with interest; for the rest of us, the conference probably isn't worth your time unless you really want to learn about some frameworks that can help you build Microservices in .NET.

Pretty Fricking Cool Library of the Week (PFCLotW)

This week's cool library is Bogus, which allows you to generate fake data for your application. It's a pretty neat library; and you should check it out. I've used it on quite a few occasions, and it's worth your time.

In today's podcast episode; I'm diving deeper into what the .NET Foundation is, and whether it's "good for us" as a community in its current form. The episode should drop by Noon EDT (-4 UTC) today; so give it a listen if that's a subject that interests you.

Transcript (Powered by otter.ai)

George Stocker  0:00  
Hi, I'm George Stocker, and welcome to last weekend dotnet. Vb dotnet is not along for the ride in dotnet core and dotnet five. Now for those of you who are hoping to get VB dotnet in dotnet, five, it doesn't look like it's going to happen. So of course, it's going to cause some consternation among VB dotnet developers, and I get it. Visual Basic was written for a time where we thought we could really make a language look like English and not be left out of the room. Now we know better. dB dotnet has done good things. And I know a few products today, they're still written in VB dotnet. But look, it's time Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7. Preview six is now available. Now this is pretty cool. You can actually get advanced versions of Visual Studio whatever the next minor version is, you can get advanced versions of it for free without a license, their preview and so they might have bugs in them, but you want to check out what's coming up in Visual Studio. It's always an interesting install. Now this one is interesting to me because it adds support for Xcode 11.6 I really don't know what this means. But I want to find out because this is really cool. Microsoft dotnet team is hiring, you can actually apply to become a program manager for the dotnet team at Microsoft, I thought about applying, but then realize that allowing everyone to be their authentic selves probably doesn't mean making fun of Microsoft on daily basis. Seriously, though, if you can move to Redmond, you should think about applying dotnet is is entering into its best years. And Microsoft really is one of the better large companies to work for Microsoft's rozlyn team. That's the team that produces the compiler for dotnet. They released a blog post about productivity improvements and their latest push for Roslyn. Now, this was in 16.6. So you may have missed it. It's been out for a few weeks. But what I just noticed is that they've added changes that allow you to see how your date time is going to be formatted when you say date, time to string You have all those options, they now give you IntelliSense for those options, and they tell you what they m...