Hi!  Here's the July edition of the .NET Foundation newsletter. Every month, we'll give you a quick overview of the .NET Open Source landscape, including top project news, events, community links and more.

This month's newsletter includes:

• .NET Meetup news
• Info on .NET Conf (Sep 12-14), followed by worldwide .NET Conf Local events through the end of October
• News from .NET Foundation member projects

As always, these are available both on our blog and via e-mail: Sign up to get the .NET Foundation Update via e-mail

Get Ready for .NET Conf and .NET Conf Local!

.NET Conf is coming to you September 12 - 14, 2018!

Over the course of the three days you have a wide selection of live sessions that feature speakers from the community and .NET product teams. These are the experts in their field and it is a chance to learn, ask questions live, and get inspired for your next software project.

You will learn to build for web, mobile, desktop, games, services, libraries and more for a variety of platforms and devices all with .NET. We have sessions for everyone, no matter if you are just beginning or are a seasoned engineer. We'll have presentations on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, C#, F#, Azure, Visual Studio, Xamarin, and much more.

We've just wrapped up the call for papers and are hard at work building the schedule now. We had almost three times as many submissions this year!

Register your .NET Conf Local events now!

.NET Conf is partnering with organizers around the globe to bring you local in-person events and watch parties! Join your fellow developers in a city near you to learn more about .NET. Don't see your city? Organize an event! Let us know soon - we're putting together special .NET Conf swag packs for the local events, so you need to get registered soon to make sure we can get the swag ordered and shipped to your event in time.

Meetups

Wow! We're continuing to see rapid growth of the .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups, Here are some quick stats:

• 111.5K Members (added over 11K in the past 30 days)
• Over 4400 RSVPs in the past 30 days
• Largest Recent Meetup: What's new in C# by David Pine (Chicago) 

We've also started sending newsletters to Meetup organizers, including some links for some free swag for their groups. If your meetup hasn't joined yet, you can right here.

.NET Foundation Project News

Red Hat: Improving .NET Core Kestrel performance using a Linux-specific transport

The Red Hat team has released a NuGet pagkage that allows you to replace Kestrel's networking layer with a Linux-specific implementation. Read this really interesting blog post that shows how to enable it, then shows and benchmarks against the default out-of-the-box implementations. 

Cake: v0.29.0 release

This release of Cake includes a lot of nice features, including the very handy 'exclusive' parameter. When you've executed a series of tasks and it fails on the last one, wouldn't it be nice if you could execute a single task, without requiring all of its dependencies to execute again? Well you're in luck, this just got added into 0.29.0! Beyond retrying failed operations - this can really speed things up while developing and debugging a script.

More details here.

xUnit.net: Hello, 2.4!

This release includes lots of usability-related features, like improved test method display name formatting, support for reporting results to VSTS, and additional command line options for the console runner.

Read the release notes here.

ML.NET: Announcing ML.NET 0.3

The ML.NET team is happy to announce the latest version: ML.NET 0.3. This release supports exporting models to the ONNX format, enables creating new types of models with Factorization Machines, LightGBM, Ensembles, and LightLDA, and addressing a variety of issues and feedback we received from the community.

Read the release post here.

Reactive Extensions for .NET: Ix and Ix Async 3.2 released

The main enhancement in this release is adding a .NET Standard 2.0 version, to minimize the dependency graph and improve build times.

Read the release notes here.

Connect with the .NET Foundation online

The .NET Foundation is on Facebook now. Please like our page! We'll post regular updates and interesting things happening with .NET to share.

The .NET Foundation is also on YouTube. Watch community standups and design reviews as well as code-focused shows and interviews across our multiple playlists.

Remember to Subscribe!

Please sign up to get the .NET Foundation Update via e-mail. Don't worry, we want to keep these short, interesting, and low-noise, so we won't overload your e-mail.

After nearly two years of service as the Community Director of the .NET Foundation (thank you!!!), Rachel Reese has asked to step down. Claire Novotny will be replacing her in this role.

Claire has been a very active member of the .NET Foundation Advisory Council, working tirelessly behind the scenes to help projects configure build infrastructure, set up code signing, and just continually working to make the .NET open source community a better place. Support for Claire to take this role was unanimous and enthusiastic - from Rachel, the rest of the .NET Foundation board, and the rest of the Advisory Council. As Executive Director, I wholeheartedly agree - Claire helps out on a daily basis behind the scenes, both helping to keep things running and to continually improve them. As an example, he personally drove a partnership with DigiCert to get individual code signing certificates issued to projects by getting the .NET Foundation set up as a CA.

Many of those involved in the .NET community already know Claire pretty well. For this announcement post, Jon Galloway interviewed Claire and chatted about his experiences to date and what he hopes the .NET Foundation will do in the future.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your background, when did you first become interested in programming?

I have always been curious to understand how and why things worked. When I was a kid, The Way Things Work, was one of my favorites. When I was young, I would take apart and reassemble the family computer to learn what the parts were. In middle school, I taught myself BASIC by reading library books containing pages of program code to type in by hand…those were the days! I have always aimed to try to help others – I was a TA for some of my early CS classes in college before switching to, and graduating with, a degree in Sociology. I love logic and problem solving, but the math and algorithms weren't for me. When Microsoft released .NET, I fell in love with C# and have been using it ever since.

What initiatives are you working on (or passionate about) within the .NET Foundation?

One current initiative I am passionate about, and working on, is code signing. I maintain and administer the Foundation's code signing services that we offer to member projects. The service was born, like many things, out of laziness. When I first took over as maintainer for the Reactive Extensions for .NET, our release process was far from streamlined. I had to remote desktop into a VM containing the Foundation's code signing certificate, copy the NuGet packages over, extract and manually sign each file. As that's far too much effort to do on a regular basis, I worked with some people to create a service that could automate this process in a secure way and that could grow to offer new capabilities.

What drives you?

I want to see others succeed. If there's something blocking them, I want to help get them unstuck. I love the deep technology, figuring stuff out, but ultimately, it's about solving business challenges and creating new things. I firmly believe that technology is meaningless in a vacuum; rather, it's an enabler. I aim to enable and empower people to do great things.