This is our first “The Week in .NET” post. Our objective in writing this is to provide more regular updates about what the team and core contributors have been working on, and to give a community heartbeat, in the form of a list of interesting links. Of course, if you wrote a great blog post, or just read one, if you want to show a great new contribution, if you’ve written a useful library, we’d love to hear from you, and feature it on future posts. You can send us such tips at beleroy at Microsoft, or you can comment on this gist with new links, or you can simply leave us a pointer in the comment section below.

.NET Core, .NET Framework 4.6.1, ASP.NET 5 RC, and Visual Studio Update 1 for .NET Managed Languages are here!

On November 18th, the team shipped .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 Release Candidates, supported on Windows, OS X, and Linux. The release is “Go Live”, meaning you can deploy apps into production and call Microsoft Support if you need help.

You can read the full details about this release here: Announcing .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 RC.

ASP.NET has its own post that you can find here: Announcing ASP.NET 5 RC.

The announcement happened at the Connect(); // 2015 conference. Follow the link for videos.

Yesterday, November 30th, .NET Framework 4.6.1 shipped with significant improvements to the development experience as well as greater reliability and performance of apps: .NET Framework 4.6.1 is now available!

On the same day, Visual Studio Update 1 for .NET Managed Languages arrived with new IDE features, interactive C#, new code analysis management, Visual F# improvements, and the new F5 experience for Roslyn open source development: What’s New in Visual Studio Update 1 for .NET Managed Languages.

Package of the week: HTML Agility Pack

If you ever have to extract information from an HTML document, you could build a quick and dirty parser, or you could use regular expressions, but the saner option is to use a proper HTML parser, and then query the resulting DOM. HTML Agility Pack provides such a parser and DOM for .NET.

HtmlAgilityPack

Here’s some code that uses HtmlAgilityPack to extract the URL of each image on this blog’s home page:

User group of the week: TRINUG

TRINUG is a user group in Raleigh, NC, USA that meets on the second Wednesday of each month. They are holding a hands-on lab tonight December 1st at 6PM to install Windows 10 on your Raspberry Pi 2.

F#/Analytics + IoT + Azure

Blog posts of the week

Marc Gravell has a very detailed tutorial and explanation of what it takes to port a .NET library to support .NET Core: The road to DNX – part 1, part 2, and part 3.

The Register explains why Microsoft’s .NET Core is the future of its development platform.

Nate Barbettini gives us his Ultimate Guide to Using Visual Studio on a Mac.

Mahmut Jomaa has a tutorial on how to upgrade an ASP.NET 5 application from Beta 8 to RC1, and Shawn Wildermuth has one as well.

Armen Shimoon annotated the diff between ASP.NET 5 Beta 8 and RC1

Shane Boyer explains how to prepare for the .NET Core Command Line Interface.

And this is it for this week!