by Jon Galloway

Here's the May 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:

  • Foundation Board Update
  • Action Groups
  • Join an Action Group!
  • .NET at Build
  • Save the Date for .NET Conf 2019
  • .NET Foundation Project Updates
  • Meetups

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


Foundation Board Update

Back in March, we announced the results of the .NET Foundation Board of Directors. You may be wondering what's happened since? It's been a bit quiet.

The board has had three meetings! Talk about results!

Joking aside, it takes time to take a brand new group of distributed folks and mold them into a lean mean directing machine. It's not only taking time to think through vision and roadmaps, but the nitty gritty details of exactly how they will work together across timezones and distance.

Action Groups

The board also has set up a set of action groups to focus on some key focus areas. These action groups will be led by board members, joined by .NET Foundation Members, so this is a great way for you to get involved!

Marketing

The main goal of marketing is to create consistent, powerful storytelling in order to increase share of voice and establish .NET Foundation industry relevance. We focus on the marketing efforts for the .NET Foundation itself and .NET in general.

Communications

This team focuses on communicating coordinating our regular communications with the .NET Foundation members and broader .NET open source community.

Corporate Relations

The Corporate Relations action group is responsible for fostering the relationship between corporate entities and the .NET Foundation. The goal is to make sure that membership to the .NET Foundation is valuable to corporations, and in-turn that corporations participate in the .NET Foundation to the benefit of the entire .NET ecosystem.

Membership

This group's goal is to bring on and involve new members.

Outreach

The goal of this group is to reach a new, diverse developer base as well as those underserved in the developer community.

Project Support

The Project Support action group is responsible for brainstorming and helping to implement the various ways (and services) that the .NET Foundation offers to member projects. The goal is to ensure that member projects are sustainable and well supported. The services that the .NET Foundation offers to member projects should be valuable and appreciated by those projects.

Speakers and Meetups

This group is all about making our .NET meetups around the world successful.

Technical Review

The goal of the technical review group is to provide an independent viewpoint separate from Microsoft on the technical direction of our projects.
 


Join an Action Group!

The board is still working through issues of how to get any and all foundation members involved in these action groups. We want to do as much work as possible in the open with your support, but we're figuring out the logistics. But we're ready to take signups from members who are interested in getting involved and shaping these teams. Ask your questions directly to the board by filing an issue here.

If you're a .NET Foundation Member, sign up to join an action group:

Sign Up For An Action Group


.NET at Build

.NET had a huge presence at Microsoft Build earlier this month and made some big announcements and releases. The .NET 5 roadmap was introduced, .NET Core 3.0 Preview 5 was released, and ML .NET, a machine learning framework for .NET developers, released version 1.0! Here's links to the videos and slides of a few of the great sessions.

For a lot more, head to Microsoft Build On-demand

.NET  

.NET

.NET 

Save the Date for .NET Conf 2019

.NET

At Build, the dates for .NET Conf 2019 were announced. It will be taking place on September 23-25, 2019. This will be the .NET Core 3.0 launch event as it will move out of preview and release at the start of the conference. You don't want to miss this FREE, online conference this year! Call for content will open soon so stay tuned to Twitter hashtag #dotnetconf and the website www.dotnetconf.net!


.NET Foundation Project Updates


NUnit 3.12 Released

Version 3.12 of the NUnit framework was released! This is the release where test projects targeting .NET Framework 2.0 will need to target .NET Framework 3.5. The application or library which the project is testing can still target .NET Framework 2.0, though Microsoft does not support this.

There are many small improvements in 3.12, and new features include:

  • Apartment and Timeout attributes available to any .NET Standard 2.0-compatible framework
  • Type converters used as a fallback when converting test parameters
  • A bunch of async-related requests, like support for ValueTask and other custom awaitable types
  • A ten-second timeout for work posted to the synchronization context by async STA tests to finish

The 'dotnet new nunit' template has also been updated with a better default root namespace and updated project dependencies.

Orleans 1.5.8

Orleans 1.5.8 is a patch release for people that haven't migrated to 2.x yet. It includes a couple of streaming bug fixes backported from 2.x.
 

DNN Connect

The annual European-based DNN Conference, DNN-Connect, is happening next week in Switzerland.


Meetups

Our .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups are continuing to grow worldwide. Here are some quick stats:

  • 294 Groups
  • 59 Countries
  • 217K Members (+20K in the past 30 days!)

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.
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.NET Foundation Meetup Map  


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.

by Jon Galloway

Today we welcome three projects to the .NET Foundation: ImageSharp, AngleSharp, and Coverlet!

ImageSharp

ImageSharp

ImageSharp is is a new, fully featured, fully managed, cross-platform, 2D graphics API. Designed to democratize image processing, ImageSharp brings you an incredibly powerful yet beautifully simple API. Compared to System.Drawing we have been able to develop something much more flexible, easier to code against, and much, much less prone to memory leaks. Gone are system-wide process-locks; ImageSharp images are thread-safe and fully supported in web environments.

Check out the ImageSharp announcement post: ImageSharp joins the .NET foundation


AngleSharp

AngleSharp

One thing the .NET ecosystem has been lacking for a while is a modern HTML5 parser. Furthermore, any other modern web tools have only been accessible via third-party (mostly native) applications (e.g., Selenium interop with a standard browser). AngleSharp tries to change this by bringing all the components for parsing, manipulating, and rendering current web applications. This includes evaluation of JavaScript and styling with CSS. The ambition of the project is to equip .NET developers with a toolbelt that is as complete as possible for all tasks in the web space.

More from the AngleSharp team here: Joining the .NET Foundation


Coverlet

Coverlet

Coverlet is a popular open source code coverage framework for .NET. It makes adding code coverage to your project fast and seamless and works on all platforms supported by the .NET Core SDK. Coverlet supports existing coverage reporting standards allowing it to be easily integrated with existing tools like IDEs and CI servers.

Read the Coverlet announcement post here: Coverlet Joins the .NET Foundation


We're really happy to have these projects join the .NET Foundation! Welcome!