Microsoft is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the .NET Conf on November 10 until 12 2020. This virtual conference offers 80 sessions with over 100 speakers from all over the world. The big highlight of the conference was the release of .NET 5 which succeeds .NET Core 3.1 and is the first step to a unified .NET platform.
Keynote with all the Scotts
The keynote was held by Scott Hunter and he started with an overview of .NET Core and the .NET ecosystem and where it stands right now. According to StackOverflow, .NET Core is the most loved framework in the years 2019 and 2020, it is in the top 30 of highest velocity OOS projects and ASP.NET Core achieved first place in the TechEmpower Benchmarks test. Additionally, C# is a top 5 language on GitHub and more than 2 million developers are using .NET Core and Visual Studio.
Afterward, Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie joined. Hanselman showed how easy it is to render websites using Microsofts Edge in a .NET 5 desktop application and Guthrie talked about the beginning of ASP.NET and even showed the original hand-written specifications for it.
Everything gets an update
If you have seen the last .NET Conf in summer, then you didn’t learn a lot of new things in this one. We have a comprehensive summary of the last .NET Conf, here, in case you missed it. As previously mentioned, the highlight of this event was the release of .NET 5. Microsoft also introduces a new release cycle with .NET 5. From now on, a new major release will be published every November, this means in November 2021 we get .NET 6, in November 2022 .NET 7, and so on. Every even number will be an LTS (long term support) version. Even though .NET 5 is not an LTS version, we highly recommend updating your application to the newest version.
Upgrading from .NET Core 3.1 is very simple and should be fast in most cases. For example, we updated all our internal microservice within one day, including all CI/CD pipelines, and have them already running in our AKS cluster. .NET Core 3.1 was already fast but .NET 5 is even faster, especially with gRPC and serialization.
Another nice feature of .NET 5 is the reduction in size of container images, which means that containers can be built and started even faster. Additionally, you can create single-file applications now which makes the whole process even simpler.
To use .NET 5, you have to download the .NET 5 SDK and Visual Studio 2019 16.8 or higher. Visual Studio 2019 16.8 also comes with a new Git experience and allows to deploy with GitHub Actions directly out of Visual Studio. With .NET 5 comes also C# 9 with some nice new features like records that allow you to define a class with a constructor and all its properties in a single line.
Watch all the talks
All sessions were live-streamed on Youtube. Below you can find all timestamps to the sessions of the first day.
18:47 - Keynote - Welcome to .NET 5
1:40:35 - .NET Foundation “State of the Foundation”
1:54:00 - What’s New in C#?
2:22:25 - A talk for trailblazers: Blazor in .NET 5
2:52:28 - Porting Projects to .NET 5
3:20:52 - Entity Framework Core 5.0: The Next Generation for Data Access
3:50:10 - Modern Web Development with Blazor & .NET 5
4:19:16 - Xamarin.Forms 5: Beautiful and Fast Apps with Less Code
4:48:26 - Developing and Deploying Microservices with ‘Tye’
5:19:34 - Get to know the .NET 5.0 SDK
5:48:54 - Introducing F# 5
6:18:37 - .NET 5 Runtime Deep Dive with Rich Lander and the Architects
6:50:39 - ML.NET in the Real World
7:20:00 - What’s new for desktop developers building WPF, UWP & WinForms
7:51:54 - High-performance Services with gRPC: What’s new in .NET 5
8:19:20 - Developer Fun with Scott Hanselman
9:03:13 - Virtual Attendee Party!
If you need help upgrading your application to .NET 5 or are interested in more training or best practices about DevOps, Docker or CI/CD pipelines contact us at info@4tecture.ch.