.NET Foundation March/April 2021 Update

April 30, 2021 by Claire Novotny

Welcome to the .NET Foundation update for March & April. Every other month, we'll give you a quick overview of the .NET open source landscape and what the .NET Foundation is up to, including top project news, events, community links and more.

General news

.NET Foundation "State of .NET" survey results

We launched a "State of .NET" survey in November that closed on March 31, 2021. Thank you to all who participated. Your feedback is very important to the .NET Foundation. This was the first survey ever done by the .NET Foundation to the .NET developer community and we will continue to do them every year going forward. The survey was conducted via SurveyMonkey. We collected 4,509 responses, analyzed all the results, read all the comments, and wrote about our findings. You can view the reports and our insights here and download the anonymous raw data here.

Those who entered to win a $250 gift certificate to the .NET Foundation Store will be notified via email if you are a winner. Thank you again for participating.

.NET Foundation Project Updates

Project Spotlight

Each month Project Spotlight shines a light on an interesting open source project and its maintainers.

In March, .NET Foundation Marketing Committee member, Isaac Levin, spoke with Maintainer of the Orleans project, Reuben Bond, to talk about the work Microsoft is doing in the Microservices space with .NET.

Orleans

Orleans is a framework for building stateful, cloud applications. Orleans applications are composed of Cloud Native Objects which allow developers to write applications which scale from a single machine to a large cluster without modifying code. Orleans efficiently distributes these objects as your application scales and handles the complexities of distributed systems so that developers can focus on application logic. Orleans powers many services in Microsoft, including Azure PlayFab, Azure ML, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, and backends for some of the largest Xbox games.

In April, Isaac spoke with Maintainer of the Roslyn Compiler project, Jared Parsons, and gave a little insight into how Microsoft thinks about building compilers and other language tools.

Roslyn

Roslyn is the C# and Visual Basic compiler and IDE experience project. It contains the source code for all of your C# and VB experiences all the way from the core compilers, Intellisense, syntax highlighting, and edit and continue logic. Anything you want to know about how your development environment works for .NET you can see in action in this repository.

New Projects

The .NET Foundation would like to welcome the following new projects!


Stride Game Engine		Stride is an open-source C# game engine for realistic rendering and VR. The engine is highly modular and aims at giving game makers more flexibility in their development. Stride comes with an editor that allows you to create and manage the content of your games or applications visually and intuitively.
C# standardization		This project produces the standard C# language specification. The ECMA committee standardizes the formal specification of the C# language
Ant Design Blazor		Ant Design Blazor is a set of enterprise-class UI components based on Ant Design and Blazor.
Finbuckle.MultiTenant		Finbuckle.MultiTenant is a open source multitenancy library for .NET. It provides for tenant resolution, per-tenant app behavior, and per-tenant data isolation.
Silk.NET		Silk.NET is a high-performance, low-level wrapper over many native libraries that forms a one-stop-shop for .NET graphics and compute workloads, such as custom game/game engine development. Aiming to be the one library you need for multimedia, graphics, and compute applications.

New Releases

Oqtane 2.0.1 Released

Since releasing version 2.0 in coordination with the .NET 5 launch event at .NET Conf in November 2020, the exciting new modular application framework for Blazor has continued to mature and gain momentum. This release includes a variety of performance and user experience improvements for both users and developers. A total of 101 pull requests were merged from 9 different contributors, pushing the total number of project commits all-time over 1600. The 2.0.1 release is available for download on Github.

.NET Foundation Committee Updates

Marketing Committee Update

The Marketing committee is working towards a new web presence, including a new design and content updates to make it easier for visitors to navigate and find value as well as to make it easier for volunteers to contribute. We hope to start the project in May and complete it by the end of June.
We've been working with the Project committee on a GTM checklist to help new projects think through their marketing presence and activities.
We merged the Xamarin store into the .NET Foundation store so there are now a bunch of new items available to show off your pride for Xamarin. Microsoft also donated new dotnet-bot T-shits and stickers with an adventure theme to the store. Show your support and check out the new Hiking and Juggling T-shirts and the Lounge, Play, Practice and Work stickers.
We updated the .NET Foundation slide deck that you can use to help spread the good word about the foundation.

Events

JetBrains .NET Days Online 2021

For the third time, JetBrains are organizing JetBrains .NET Days Online - a free virtual event that will take place on May 11–12, 2021. Community speakers are presenting topics they are passionate about. You can expect a variety of levels of technical content, and speakers may also share their personal experiences and development.

The topics on this year's agenda include C#, F#, GraphQL, Blazor, gRPC, Hedy, working with databases, and debugging. On top of that, we'll discuss stereotypes around legacy code and demonstrate how to build a React app backed with Azure features.

For more information, head over to the registration page!

Microsoft Build 2021, May 25 - 27

Learn. Connect. Code. Register for the Microsoft Build digital event happening May 25 - 27, 2021. This free event will feature a fantastic lineup of sessions from Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie and Microsoft developer tools leaders including Amanda Silver, Scott Hanselman, Scott Hunter, and Donovan Brown. You will also learn about what's coming in .NET 6, Visual Studio, Azure, GitHub and more. Register for free today.

.NET Conf: Focus on Windows, sessions now on-demand

.NET Conf: Focus on Windows virtual event was broadcasted on February 25th with 9 hours of content over 17 sessions. The event showcased Windows development on .NET 5, introduced the .NET Upgrade Assistant to help developers move their .NET Framework-based apps to .NET 5, and provided deep learning on a variety of topics important to Windows developers. There were 25K live views and 18K unique viewers throughout the day.

The .NET Foundation sponsored the event and we coordinated a joint announcement on the broadcast during the keynote with the Uno Platform. Uno Platform has joined as corporate sponsor. Uno Platform joins the group of corporations that are helping drive the future of the .NET platform and ecosystem and we are incredibly grateful for their support.

If you missed it, you can watch th sessions, get the slides and demos, and grab your virtual swag by heading to https://focus.dotnetconf.net

How to Get Involved

The .NET Foundation is only as good as the community that supports it. There are many ways to get involved.

Support a project

Projects, and the people behind them, are at the heart of what .NET Foundation is all about. These days, you'll find a wide variety of projects under the .NET Foundation. Can you contribute to something already in the works? Browse our projects to find out how to contribute.

Become a member

By involving people that are passionate about .NET we can create a powerful organization that furthers sustainable open source, a diverse and open community, and help evolve this growing and evolving ecosystem that we are very passionate about. If you are as passionate about the .NET ecosystem as we are, then you should consider becoming a member of the .NET Foundation. Read more about member benefits and please join to help shape the future.

Join a committee

The .NET Foundation Committees are where the vast majority of work gets done in the Foundation. The more you participate the more we can do together. Please visit the committee hub on our website to learn more and how you can get involved.

Spread the word

Help spread .NET Foundation's message. Take a look at the .NET Foundation slides and use them in your presentations and events. Members can also request promotion of their events and open source related content. See the marketing repo for details.

Buy some merch

Show off your nerd side with pride! Support the .NET Foundation by rocking some gear from our store. Check out the new items and don't forget to show them off on Twitter #dotnetlovesme.

Have some fun

Coding is better with friends, especially when they bring their own mods. As the mascot for the .NET community, dotnet-bot helps with checking pull requests on .NET repos on GitHub. Create your own coding companion by building your own custom dotnet-bot at mod-dotnet-bot.net and sharing it on Twitter #dotnetlovesme.