.NET Foundation July 2019 Update

by Jon Galloway

Here's the July 2019 .NET Foundation update. 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:

  • New Process For Newsletter Submission
  • Project Onboarding Process Improvements
  • Join an Action Group!
  • .NET Foundation at OSCON 2019
  • .NET Conf 2019, September 23-25 (www.dotnetconf.net)
  • .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

New Process For Newsletter Submission

We have a new process for submitting project news! Yay! No more cumbersome spreadsheets! Check out the README for more details. We also have a handy YouTube video that walks through the process.

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Project Onboarding Process Improvements

Project onboarding is now handled publicly via GitHub issues. The process is now more transparent and visible. Progress through the process is easily visualized via a GitHub project board.

This is part of our effort to move to open processes so action groups and community members can more easily participate. The previous process was buried in emails and word documents and lacked visibility and transpancey.

We have an issue template for new project applications here: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/projects/issues/new/choose

Key goals:

  • Clear status to projects
  • Use milestones and labels to batch up applications into monthly review cycles
  • Enable action group members to review and help out on applications
  • Comments / pull requests / etc. are welcome.

Join an Action Group!

We recently announced our new Action Groups: a way for .NET Foundation members to join teams and get directly involved in helping the .NET Foundation scale to the next level. Our teams include the following:

  • Communications
  • Corporate Relations
  • Marketing
  • Membership
  • Outreach
  • Project Support
  • Speakers and Meetups
  • Technical Review

We've been figuring out logistics and communications as we move to working publicly and with a large team. We've settled on GitHub Organizational Teams and are continuing to roll this out to the teams - we've mostly started with Marketing and Project Support so far, but are now working on getting other groups more involved in our day to day business.

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

Sign Up For An Action Group

.NET Foundation at OSCON 2019

Jon Galloway, Executive Director of the .NET Foundation, attended and spoke at OSCON this month. Check out his presentation slides and notes from the conference: .NET Foundation at OSCON 2019.

.NET Conf 2019, September 23-25 (www.dotnetconf.net)

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.NET Conf is our annual, free, online virtual event and this year and it's going to be bigger than ever. .NET Core 3.0 will launch at .NET Conf!

The .NET Conf Call for Speakers is now open. This is your chance to present to the world-wide .NET Community remotely from your own time-zone. Head to www.dotnetconf.net to learn more and save the date!

.NET Foundation Project Updates

ML.NET 1.2 released

ML.NET 1.2 and updates to Model Builder and the CLI were released on early July 2019. ML.NET is an open-source and cross-platform machine learning framework for .NET developers. ML.NET also includes Model Builder (a simple UI tool for Visual Studio) and the ML.NET CLI (Command-line interface) to make it super easy to build custom Machine Learning (ML) models using Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). Using ML.NET, developers can leverage their existing tools and skill-sets to develop and infuse custom ML into their applications by creating custom machine learning models for common scenarios like Sentiment Analysis, Price Prediction, Image Classification and more!

The following are some of the key highlights in this release:

  • General availability of TimeSeries support for forecasting and anomaly detection
  • General availability of ML.NET packages to use TensorFlow and ONNX models
  • Easily integrate ML.NET models in web or serverless apps with Microsoft.Extensions.ML integration package
  • MLNET CLI and Model Builder for Visual Studio were updated with multiple improvements

For further details on the ML.NET 1.2 release, check this Blog Post:

Announcing ML.NET 1.2 and Model Builder updates (Machine Learning for .NET)

Get started with MLNET here. Get started with Model Builder here. Refer to documentation for tutorials and more resources. Learn from samples apps for different scenarios using ML.NET.
 

Cake v0.34.0 released & v0.34.1 released
cakebuild

Version 0.34.0 has several features, improvements and bug fixes, full details in the linked blog post but a few highlights in this release:

  • Improved MSBuild 16 (VS2019) tool resolution
  • Update to Roslyn version 3.0.0
  • Updated to NuGet client version 5
  • NuGet pack support for several new nuspec elements

Version 0.34.1 is just a minor release as a hotfix to address an issue breaking scripts when the dynamic C# keyword was used in build scripts. This was a side effect of updating from Roslyn 2.x to 3.x.

🎉 We're also happy to share that Cake turned five years old this May! And we've just done our 100th Cake release! 🎉
Huge thanks to our contributors and users! Wouldn't have been possible without your support! ❤

Migrate ASP.NET Web Forms Sites to .NET Core using DotVVM

Did you know that DotVVM can be used to incrementally modernize old ASP.NET Web Forms applications and lift them to .NET Core? It is much easier than doing a full rewrite, and the application can be deployed at any time during the entire process.

  • Install DotVVM NuGet package in your Web Forms site
  • Create a DotVVM master page using the same CSS
  • Start converting ASPX pages to DotHTML syntax, one at a time
  • When all the Web Forms pages are gone, change your CSPROJ to use .NET Core

We have created some useful resources that will help you in this process.

Prism v7.2.0.1367 released

Prism 7.2 has several improvements for WPF and Xamarin.Forms developers including:

  • New Fluent API for the IContainerRegistry
  • Added several new API's to IContainerRegistry and IContainerProvider that significantly reduce the need to depend directly on the root container
  • Optimizations for the Weak DelegateReference for the EventAggregator
  • Added a new Dialog Service allowing developers to create dialogs in their app with a more custom look and feel

Additionally Xamarin.Forms developers will be able to enjoy:

  • New initialization API's including IInitialize, IInitializeAsync & IAutoInitialize. These all help you to replace the now Obsolete OnNavigatingTo from INavigatingAware and INavigationAware
  • Automatic ViewRegistrion
  • Additional XAML Extensions... all XAML Extensions are now fully bindable
  • Enhanced Modal logic that should eliminate the need to ever specify whether to use Modal navigation when Navigating back from a page.
  • Added extension to allow selecting tabs from the NavigationService

For more great information be sure to tune in and follow Prism's maintainers

Akka.NET v1.3.14 Released

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3 You know what? We're going to stop promising that this is the last 1.3.x release, because even though we've said that twice... We now have another 1.3.x release.

1.3.14 consists of non-breaking bugfixes and additions that have been contributed against the Akka.NET v1.4.0 milestone thus far. These include:

To see the full set of changes for Akka.NET v1.3.14, click here.

Follow Akka.NET on Twitter if you're interested in receiving more updates from the project.
 

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit v19.1.0 - Now Available

A few years ago, we took over maintenance and guidance for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit project. Please refer to this blog post for more information on the project and why we stepped in to assist.

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As part of our ongoing commitment to the project, we've released an update (ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit v19.1.0) to address the following issues.

Improvements

  • Visual Studio 2019 Support
  • Security hardening: HTML-encode file names in AjaxFileUpload (#483)

Resolved Issues

  • AutoCompleteExtender: the TextChanged event is not fired in Edge (#458)
  • Rating: The raise_mouseOver method has an invalid argument name (#461)
  • AsyncFileUpload changes the frame target to _top (#466)
  • HtmlEditorExtender unconditionally removes tags with data URLs (#467)
  • NRE in IsLocalizationEnabled() within a PageAsyncTask (#486)

Ready to Upgrade?

To update the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, please download our most recent installer using the link below.

Download

Or, if you prefer, use Nuget:

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Nuget package

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please share your thoughts on this update via GitHub.
 

Sextant 2.0 released

Sextant a view model navigation library released 2.0. This release adds a few new features, cleans up some existing issues and deprecated some functionality.

  • We changed the way regsitration of Sextant dependencies are handled

  • Added Navigation Parameters that are passed on Navigation

  • Added Sextant.XamForms for Xamarin.Forms support

  • Example

Meetups

Our .NET Foundation sponsored .NET Meetup Pro groups are continuing to grow worldwide. We just passed 300 groups! Here are some quick stats:

  • 307 Groups
  • 60 Countries
  • 230K Members

Our .NET Meetup Pro group helps developers find your group, as well as get involved with local events like .NET Conf Local. If your meetup hasn't joined yet, you can right here.
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.NET Meetup

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.

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