Microsoft Connect(); 2018: .NET foundation open membership, .NET Core 2.2, .NET Core 3 Preview 1 released, WPF, WinUI, Windows forms open sourced

Yesterday Microsoft made a handful of announcements at Connect (); 2018. The membership to the .NET foundation is now open, .NET Core 2.2 is released, .NET Core 3 Preview 1 is released and Windows Forms, WinUI are now open source.

Membership is now open to the .NET Foundation

Found in 2014, the .NET Foundation was formed to foster .NET open source development and collaboration. Microsoft has set the membership open to the community. It is also expanding on the number of board members from three to seven and only one of the seats will be occupied by a Microsoft employee with the remaining elected from the open source community. The board elections will commence in January 2019 and any individual who has contributed to a .NET Foundation open source project is eligible. This criteria also applies to become a member and the election will be held every year.

You can apply for a membership on their website. To know more about membership and eligibility, head to the Microsoft Blog.

New features in .NET Core 2.2

.NET Core 2.2 comes with diagnostic improvements to the runtime, ARM32 support for Windows and Azure Active Directory for SQL Client.

Tiered compilation

Tiered compilation enables the runtime to use the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler more adaptively. This will give better performance at startup to maximize throughput. It is an opt-in option and is enabled by default in .NET Core 3.0.

Runtime events

With .NET Core 2.2, CoreCLR events can be consumed using the EventListener class. These CoreCLR events describe the behavior of GC, JIT, ThreadPool, and interop. They are the same events exposed as part of the CoreCLR ETW provider on Windows. This allows applications to consume these events or use a transport mechanism to send them to a telemetry aggregation service.

Support for AccessToken in SqlConnection

Setting the AccessToken property to authenticate SQL Server connections are now supported in the ADO.NET provider for SQL Server, SqlClient. This is done using Azure Active Directory. To use the feature, the access token value can be obtained using Active Directory Authentication Library for .NET. This library is present in the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory NuGet package.

Injecting code prior to Main

.NET Core 2.2 enables injecting code prior to running an application main method. This can be done via a startup hook. Startup hooks allow for a host to customize application behavior after it has been deployed.

Windows ARM32

Windows ARM32 is now supported in .NET Core 2.2 just like Linux ARM32 which was added in .NET Core 2.1. A bug prevented publishing of .NET Core builds for Windows ARM32. These builds will be available for .NET Core 2.2.1, in January 2019.

.NET Core 3 Preview 1

.NET Core 3 Preview 1 is the first public release of .NET Core 3. Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 will support development with .NET Core 3. .NET Core 3 is a major update. It adds support for building Windows desktop applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Entity Framework 6 (EF6). Read more about the preview on the .NET Blog.

WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI are now open source

After .NET Core went open source in 2014, it saw many contributions from the community. Microsoft is now open sourcing WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI. Some code will be available in GitHub now and more will be added over the next few months. Repositories for WPF and WinUI are ready too.

WPF and Windows Forms projects are under the .NET Foundation. This happened at the Connect(); conference yesterday when Microsoft employees merged the first two community pull requests on stage.

This is another step from Microsoft towards open source, strongly signaling the seriousness of their open source commitment.

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