InfoQ examined a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of February 22th, 2021.
This week's highlight was the first edition of the .NET Conf: Focus event series, this time featuring Windows desktop development topics. The event covered both existing functionalities on .NET 5 and upcoming projects such as .NET MAUI and Project Reunion. It also included the preview release of the .NET Upgrade Assistant, an automated tool to assist developers in upgrading existing .NET applications to .NET 5. The complete recording of this event is already available on YouTube. Recordings of all .NET Conf and .NET Conf: Focus events are available in curated playlists on MSDN Channel 9.
The .NET Foundation released their first Update report of 2021, a bimonthly digital publication containing an overview of the .NET open source landscape and updates related to events and projects with which the foundation is involved. This edition included the announcement of Uno Platform as a corporate sponsor for the .NET Foundation and the first major release of Cake, the popular build automation system built on top of the Roslyn compiler.
As part of their outreach initiatives, both Microsoft and the .NET Foundation published surveys aimed at the open-source community. The idea is to better understand the community needs and - in the case of the .NET Foundation - prioritize their work. You can find the links to both surveys here.
Microsoft released a cumulative update preview for .NET Framework for multiple versions of Windows. The release contains multiple quality and reliability improvements on the CLR, WPF, and Windows Forms. More details about the update can be found in the official release announcement.
Microsoft also released updates to the PowerShell extension for Visual Code, with new semantic highlighting bug fixes and updates to the language server client. The updates are available on the Visual Studio Code marketplace.
Another conference that took place this week was Netcoreconf 2021, with sessions covering different topics related to .NET, Azure, Xamarin, AI, and Big Data. This event was free, and all session recordings are available on YouTube.