The week in .NET – On .NET with Eric Mellino, Happy Birthday from Scott Hunter, OzCode

Previous posts:

• On .NET with Beth Massi, NeinLinq.
• On .NET with Phil Haack, Readline.
• On .NET on Docker and new Core tooling, Benchmark.NET, Magicka.

On .NET

In last week’s episode, Kendra interviewed Eric Mellino to talk about his CrazyCore game and game engine:

This week, Phillip Carter will be on the show to walk an F# beginner and experienced C# dev (me) through the Tour of F#. We’ll stream live on Channel 9. We’ll take questions on Gitter’s dotnet/home channel and on Twitter. Please use the #onnet tag. It’s OK to start sending us questions in advance if you can’t do it live during the shows.

Happy Birthday .NET!

A couple weeks ago we got together with the Microsoft Alumni Network and threw a big .NET 15th birthday bash with former .NET team members & rock stars. We caught up with Scott Hunter, Director of Program Management for .NET, to share his excitement on past, present and future of .NET. Great times!

Tool of the week: OzCode

OzCode is a great Visual Studio debugging extension that makes debugging Linq considerably easier. Drill down into expressions, analyze the data set at any spot in a fluent call chain, analyze complex Boolean expressions, predict exceptions, and much, much more.

User group meeting of the week: making toys in F# in NYC

The NYC F# .NET user group has a hackathon tonight at 6:30PM where you’ll explore toy making in F# with Steve Goguen.

Update to last week’s package of the week

In last week’s post, I showed NeinLinq, a way to use custom code with Linq in a more general way than is possible out of the box. The next day, I got a message from Damien Guard about his work on this topic with David Fowler in 2009. Check out his blog post from back then.

.NET

• MSTest V2 – Now and Ahead by Pratap Lakshman.
• Xamarin .NET Workbooks – Interactive Computing is a stellar learning tool by Scott Hanselman.
• Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies by Szymon Warda.
• Going beyond SOS with ClrMD – Part 1 by Christophe Nasarre and Kevin Gosse.
• Implementing and usage of INotifyPropertyChanged by jbe2277.
• Abusing .NET Core CLI by Alexander Tsvetkov.
• Using strongly typed configuration in .NET Core console app by Kaduk Frantisek.

ASP.NET

• WordPress Running on .NET by Benjamin Fistein.
• Under the hood of the Middleware Analysis package by Andrew Lock.
• Get Current Route Name From ASP.NET Web API Request by Khalid Abuhakmeh.
• How to Send Email using .NET Core by Ben Cull.
• Implementing an Audit Trail using ASP.NET Core and Elasticsearch with NEST by Damien Bod.

C#

• C#7 – Taking a second look at Tuples by Mark Downie.
• C#7: Tools by Jeff Yates.

F#

• Tour of F#
• F# 4.1 on Docker
• Solving 5th Grade Math with F# and OCR, by Martin Andersen
• You, Too, Can Build Xamarin Apps with F#, by Greg Shackles
• Rapid API Development with Azure Functions, by Mark Heath
• Yes, Virginia, You Can Write HoloLens Apps in F#, by Paul Blair

New F# Language Suggestions:

• Allow implementing the same interface at different generic instantiations in the same type
• List literals (allow overloading the [] operator)
• Allow application in combination with dynamic (?) operator
• Package references in F# scripting
• Using the pipe operator to assign the output of a pipe to a variable

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

Xamarin

• Xamarin Stable Release: Cycle 9 by Bri Brothers.
• Join Us for Round 2 of Xamarin University Presents: Getting Started with Xamarin by Mark Smith.
• Mobile Center Webinar Recordings | Mobile Center for Xamarin Developers and Continuous Delivery by Courtney Witmer.
• Building Your First Xamarin.Mac App by Adam Hartley.
• How do industry leaders set their mobile apps apart? by Cormac Foster.
• Sending Files to a Xamarin.Forms App – Part 2: Android by Matthew Soucoup.
• Xamarin Forms ListView Grouping, & Xamarin Forms Timer by Adam Pedley.
• Xamarin.Tips – Calling Platform-Specific Code from a Portable Class Library – Xamarin.Forms DependencyService, Xamarin.Tips – Create a Bindable Picker in Xamarin.Forms, & Xamarin.Tips – Super Simple Sqlite by Alex Dunn.
• Version Bumping iOS & Android apps in VSTS, & Xamarin.Forms Android Selected & Unselected Tab Colors by James Montemagno.
• The Xamarin Show 16: Polished UI for Xamarin.Forms with Sam Basu by James Montemagno.
• Visual Studio Toolbox: Using Espresso Tests by Channel 9.

UWP

• Real-Time Communications on the Universal Windows Platform with WebRTC and ORTC by James Cadd.
• Supporting “launch at startup” in a desktop app converted with the Desktop Bridge by Matteo Pagani.
• Using a Dynamic System Accent Color in UWP by Diederik Krols.
• Screenshots for a UWP Xbox App by Nick Randolph.
• UWP Community Toolkit 1.3 Released – now with Markdown by Roland Weigelt.

Azure

• Configuring ASP.NET Core Applications in Azure App Service by Adrian Hall.
• Azure App Service Secrets and Web Site Hidden Gems by Scott Hanselman.
• Running SQL Server + ASP.Net Core in a container on Linux in Azure Container Service on Docker Swarm – part 1, part 2, and part 3 by Mahesh M Kshirsagar.
• Docker Machine with an existing Azure VNET by Carlos Mendible.
• Rapid API Development with Azure Functions by Mark Heath.
• Azure Functions Proxies Preview by Jason Roberts.

Data

• Quickly insert millions of rows in SQL Server in .NET by Gérald Barré.

Games

• The Feature Lens: Procedural Generation
• An Introduction to Game Audio Scripting (Part 1) by Chris Tammik
• [SadConsole] 2/25 Major Update by Andy De George
• [Unity] Camera Shake by Sebastian Lague
• [Unity 5.5] Tutorial: How to create a Fuel bar by Gamad
• Unity 5 – Artificial Intelligence / Basic AI – Part 01 by Gabriel Aguiar Prod.
• Hex Map 14: Terrain Textures by Catlike Coding
• Developing a Dynamic 2D Camera in Unity by Harry Ryder
• MonoGame – Putting Text Onscreen With SpriteFonts by Chris G. Williams.

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. The F# section is provided by Phillip Carter, the gaming section by Stacey Haffner, and the Xamarin section by Dan Rigby, and the UWP section by Michael Crump.

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:

• Send an email to beleroy at Microsoft,
• comment on this gist
• Leave us a pointer in the comments section below.
• Send Stacey (@yecats131) tips on Twitter about .NET games.

This week’s post (and future posts) also contains news I first read on The ASP.NET Community Standup, on Weekly Xamarin, on F# weekly, and on Chris Alcock’s The Morning Brew.