The week in .NET - 3/1/2016

To read last week’s post, see The week in .NET – 2/23/2016.

On.NET

Last week, we had a fun, slightly chaotic discussion with Scott Hanselman. This week, our guest is Rachel Reese, and we’ll talk about Jet.com and F#.

Package of the week: SkiaSharp

Xamarin released a new 2D drawing API based on Google’s powerful Skia library that powers Chrome, Firefox, and Android’s graphic stack. SkiaSharp is a portable library with support for OS X, Android, iOS, Mono, and .NET Framework.

Tool of the week: Docfx

Since its inception, .NET has included the ability for developers to include documentation in the form of XML doc comments. Going from those comments to a great web site serving readable documentation with a good table of contents was often a clunky experience however. Docfx brings a modern solution to this problem, that leverages the power of Markdown and YAML, and enables both conceptual and reference documentation in the same place, with a simple cross-reference system between them. It’s also possible to include code samples as partial views of code files on disk. This is extremely useful if you believe that the code samples in your documentation should be part of your test suites, in order to maintain their accuracy.

docfx

For more information, Seth Juarez recorded a video about Docfx.

User group of the week: TRINUG

TRINUG holds its weekly meetup this week on Wednesday, March 2 with a talk from Kip Streithorst on high level web application architecture.

.NET

You’ve heard the news: Scott Guthrie welcomes the Xamarin team to Microsoft, and Nat Friedman gives the Xamarin point of view.
StackOverflow, the architecture 2016 edition by Nick Craver.
Saying “Goodbye” to DNX and “Hello!” to the .NET Core CLI (video) by Damian Edwards & David Fowler.
Introduction to Microsoft.Data.Sqlite by Ranjan Dailata.
New Toolchain For .NET – Dotnet CLI by Paweł Grudzień.
Plugging the CoreCLR’s JIT into CPython.
Vance Morrison’s legendary multithreading papers What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps and Understand the Impact of Low-Lock Techniques in Multithreaded Apps are available again as PDF from his blog.
NBench testing garbage collection by Andrea Angella.
ConditionalWeakTable and dynamic properties in .NET 4+ by Chris Whitworth.
Fun async tricks for getting better performance and Dependency management in a crisis by Ayende Rahien.

ASP.NET

David Paquette, James Chambers, and Simon Timms have a new show on Channel 9 called ASP.NET Monsters about building apps with ASP.NET Core.
Keeping POST and GET Separated by Dino Esposito.
Using Let’s Encrypt with IIS on Windows by Rick Strahl.

F#

This Friday, March 4th! fsharpConf 2016 will be live on Channel 9. Check out the lineup of speakers.
F# on the Desktop, by Phil Trelford.
Type Providers from the Ground Up, by Michael Newton.
.NET: A Look Through F# Lenses, by Jacqueline Homan.
Converting a DSL to Executable F# Code On-the-Fly, by Mathias Brandewinder.
Double Cone Design, by Bryan Edds.

Check out F# Weekly for more great content from the F# community.

And this is it for this week!

Contribute to the week in .NET

As always, this weekly post couldn’t exist without community contributions, and I’d like to thank all those who sent links and tips. 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? Did you make or play a great game built on .NET? We’d love to hear from you, and feature your contributions on future posts: