The week in .NET - 12/15/2015

We have some great content and news for you this week. I can’t emphasize enough that this weekly post couldn’t exist without community contributions, and I’d like to thank all those who sent links and tips. Keep them coming! In a way, this is an open source blog post series 😉

The first piece of news I want to share is that the posts are being translated to Korean by Eunji Kim. The first post can be found here. If you’d like to do the same and translate the posts to your language, and add news from your local communities, you are more than welcome to do so. Please drop me a line, and I’ll link to your translations from here.

The second news is that we’re also starting a live YouTube show that we’re calling “On.NET“, where we’ll discuss current .NET events and topics with a guest every week. Our first guest will be Miguel de Icaza, creator of Gnome, Mono, founder of Xamarin, recipient of the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, MIT Innovator of the Year 1999, and one of Time magazine’s top 100 innovators of the 21st century. Wow.

You can join the live stream on Thursday, December 17, at 10AM Pacific Time, 1PM Eastern Time.

You can also subscribe to the On.NET channel on YouTube to receive updates whenever a new video is uploaded.

If you have questions for Miguel, you’ll be able to ask them during the event, or you can send them to me in advance at beleroy at microsoft.

As always, huge thank yous to all who sent messages of encouragement and contributions. You can participate too. Did you write a great blog post, or just read one? Do you want everyone to know about an amazing new contribution or a useful library? We’d love to hear from you, and feature your contributions on future posts:

Send an email to beleroy at Microsoft,
comment on this gist
Leave us a pointer in the comments section below.

This week’s post (and future posts) also contains news I first read on ASP.NET’s community spotlight, and from Chris Alcock’s The Morning Brew, two other great sources for .NET news.

Package of the week #1: {m}brace the cloud

MBrace is a little more than a library: it’s a DSL (domain-specific language) for F# that integrates cloud programming into the language. I like to think about it as async/await for the cloud.

Here’s a small sample that reads from a queue in the cloud:

You can see this and other samples in context in this tutorial: Using Cloud Queues.

Package of the week #2: Humanizer

Dannief sent a tip about Humanizer, a library with dozens of methods that translate strings and objects back and forth between computer representations and all the messy, messy representations of human languages.

For example, here’s how you can truncate a string while respecting word boundaries:

"Long text to truncate".Truncate(10)

This code will output the string "Long text…".

Another, more elaborate example, is this bit of code that produces a human-readable list from a collection of objects:

User group of the week: Boston Mobile C# Developers

The Boston Mobile C# Developers group has a Xamarin 4 event on Thursday, December 17, at 6:00PM where you will learn how to build great native iOS and Android apps with C#.

If you want to see what user group meetings are happening in your area, try clicking here…

.NET News

Omar Khudeira from Pagea Engineering makes a great case for Why .NET?.
Ron Petrusha recaps this year of making .NET open source, and so does Matt Warren from an external perspective in Open Source .NET – 1 year later.
Stacey Haffner tells us everything we need to know about the end of support for .NET Framework versions 4, 4.5 and 4.5.1. Hint: 3.5, 4.5.2, 4.6, and 4.6.1 are still supported.
David Ebbo shows how to call the Azure ARM API using plain REST.
The ever-interesting Eric Lippert has a great series about arbitrary precision mathematical types in The dedoublifier, part one, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

ASP.NET 5

Mahesh Sabnis shows how to build an ASP.NET MVC 6 & EF 7 application.
Armen Shimoon posts on using faking in order to defer design decisions in ASP.NET 5 Web API: faking it while making it.

F#

Jamie Dixon explains why you don’t need a PhD to do F#.
Phillip Trelford has interesting posts on using type providers to create a better IntelliSense experience: Disinherited Types, and MSDNify Types.

The F# community is writing a new blog post daily for this year’s F# Advent Calendar in English. Here are some of the most recent posts: