Previous posts:

• Visual Studio 2017, .NET Core SDK, F# 4.1, On .NET with Phillip Carter, Happy Birthday from John Shewchuk, FNA, Pyre
• On .NET with Eric Mellino, Happy Birthday from Scott Hunter, OzCode.
• On .NET with Beth Massi, NeinLinq.

On .NET

We recorded two videos last week. In the first one, Scott Hunter showed Visual Studio 2017 and .NET Core SDK 1.0:

In the second video, Matt Watson from Stackify showed us Prefix, a free lightweight dev tool that shows you real-time logs, errors, queries, and more, and Retrace, a powerful commercial solution for gathering and analysis of performance data.

We have no show this week due to a last minute cancellation.

Happy Birthday .NET!

Last month 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 Dee Dee Walsh, who was one of the original Developer Relations and Community person starting before Visual Studio! Dee Dee was most famously known for her Geekfest parties and helped foster the Microsoft developer community and MVP program. Happy Birthday .NET!

Package of the week: MessagePack for C#

I’ve featured quite a few serialization libraries in the past. I have another one for you this week. MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization format that is supported on more than 50 development platforms. It’s also used by Redis. There are at least five different implementations of MessagePack for .NET, but the one I want to showcase today is MessagePack for C# by Yoshifumi Kawai, also known as neuecc, who also built ZeroFormatter. His library supports LZ4 compression, and achieves extremely fast speeds on both serialization and deserialization, with a very compact serialized size.

First, you can define a serializable data object.

And then you can serialize and deserialize it.

User group meeting of the week: the state of .NET in Sydney

On Wednesday, March 15, at 6:30PM in Sydney, Australia, the Sydney .NET User Group holds a meeting on the state of .NET, presented by Markus Egger.

.NET

• What’s New in the .NET Platform (video) by Scott Hunter.
• Announcing NuGet 4.0 RTM by Anand Gaurav.
• Optimize your productivity with .NET in Visual Studio 2017 by Kasey Uhlenhuth.
• Live Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise by Joe Morris and Manish Jayaswal.
• Run To Click Debugging in Visual Studio 2017 by Kaycee Anderson.
• Cake v0.18.0 released.
• Getting Started with .NET Core on Mac and Linux by Nate Cook for Pluralsight.
• P/invoke with unions in C# by Yi Zhang.
• Exploring .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 and the updated CLI Tools by Michael Crump.
• Turning off Telemetry Data in .NET Core by Michael Crump.

ASP.NET

• Supporting both LTS and Current releases for ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock.
• What is the Microsoft.AspNetCore metapackage? by Andrew Lock.
• Testing an ASP.NET Core MVC Protobuf API using HTTPClient and xUnit by Damien Bowden.
• ASP.NET Core MVC Anatomy (Part 1) – AddMvcCore by Steve Gordon.
• Fritz’s 10 Minute Tips – ASP.NET Core Configuration by Jeffrey T. Fritz.
• ASP.NET Core: Environment based configuring methods by Gunnar Peipman.
• Environment Variables in ASP.NET Core by Derek Comartin.
• A way too early discussion of “Jasper” by Jeremy D. Miller.
• Creating a simple blog engine by Ivan Gavryliuk.
• Book: Applying Domain Driven Design with CQRS and Event Sourcing by Nick Chamberlain, with all examples written with ASP.NET MVC.
• Precompiling MVC Views in ASP.NET Core with .csproj by Scott Sauber.
• Improve the security of your website using SSL and HSTS with ASP.NET Core by Gérald Barré.
• Simple localization and language based URLs by Gunnar Peipman.

C#

• New Features in C# 7.0 by Mads Torgersen.
• Exploring C# Productivity in Visual Studio 2017 (video) by Mads Torgersen and Kasey Uhlenhuth.

F#

F# eXchange 2017 is in London, April 6-7. Speakers include Don Syme, Phillip Carter, Scott Wlaschin, and many others.

• Using Elixir and F# Together – Bryan Hunter.
• Some Details about Visual F# Tools in VS 2017, by Vasily Kirichenko.
• Creating an Azure Function in F# from the ground up (Part 2), by Mathias Brandewinder.
• Magic of F# Type Providers , by Max Fedotov.
• Creating a fully functional F# microservice part 2: Azure, FSharp.Configuration, and part 3: Quartz.Net, Net.Mail by Michał Niegrzybowski.
• Contractive Functions on Streams in F#, by Matthew Doig.

New F# Language Suggestions:

• List’s exists2 inconsistent with Seq’s exists2
• Warn when an auto-property getter is confused with a default value

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

Xamarin

• Visual Studio for Mac – Preview 4 by Bri Brothers.
• Xamarin Alpha Release: 15.1 Alpha Preview 2 by Bri Brothers.
• Xamarin Dev Days are Coming to your City! by Jayme Singleton.
• Better Apps Faster with Visual Studio 2017 and Xamarin by Miguel de Icaza.
• Live Webinar: Introduction to Xamarin for Visual Studio 2017 by James Montemagno.
• Mobile Center: Xamarin support, detailed app analytics, and more by Keith Ballinger.
• Avoid these six mobile development pitfalls by Cormac Foster.
• Setting up Visual Studio 2017 for Xamarin Development by James Montemagno.
• NuGet Support in Xamarin Studio 6.2 by Matt Ward.
• Xamarin Forms User Control by Adam Pedley.
• Xamarin.Controls – Creating Your Own iOS Markdown UILabel, & Xamarin.Forms Borderless Entry by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin Plugins / .NET Standard with Martijn van Dijk and Michael Ridland by Michael Ridland.
• Xamarin Forms, MVVMCross, and SkiaSharp: The Holy Trinity of Cross-Platform App Development by Sylvain Gravel.
• A Xamarin port of the usb-serial-for-android library by Chris Miller.
• Pull to Refresh Example Using Xamarin.Forms by Mario Jesús Galván Miranda.
• Sending Files to a Xamarin.Forms App – Part 2: Android by Matthew Soucoup.
• Swipe to Delete and more on Xamarin.iOS by Can Bilgin.
• Xamarin Forms with Microsoft Azure by Daniel Krzyczkowski.
• Validating User Input in Xamarin.Forms, & Validating User Input in Xamarin.Forms II by David Britch.
• Forms Previewer and Custom Controls by Peter Foot.

UWP

• Visual Studio 2017 – Now Ready for Your Windows Application Development Needs By Karan Nandwani.
• Desktop Bridge: Smooth User Transition and Data Migration By Arian Ghotbi.
• Building the Terminator Vision HUD in HoloLens By Windows Apps Team.
• Playable Ads – Acquire Users Who Love to Engage with Your App by Vikram Bodavula.
• Dragging and Dropping Images and Files into the Web Browser Control by Rick Strahl.
• Debugging the Web Browser Control with FireBug by Rick Strahl.

Data

• Oracle Data Provider for .NET Support for Microsoft .NET Core by Oracle.
• ODP.NET on Microsoft .NET Core by Maher Jendoubi.

Games

• Getting Started with MonoGame on Visual Studio 2017 by Simon Jackson.
• GDC 2017 Talks.
• Project Tanks 1: Simple Fake-3D Wireframes by James Furness.
• Curated #UnityTips No. 36 by Devdog March 2017.
• Fixeds, Floats and a Block Damage Effect by Kyle Halladay.
• Real Time Strategy in Unity – Making Units Construct Buildings (2) by Unit02Games.
• 11.0 Unity Tower defense tutorial – Selling towers by inScope Studios.

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.