InfoQ examines a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of March 1st, 2021.
This week's highlight was Microsoft Ignite, an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. The three-day event started with a keynote designed entirely for mixed reality, featuring Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Mixed Reality Technical Fellow Alex Kipman. Microsoft's vision for the future of Mixed Reality was a topic well-explored in other sessions, along with the presentation and showcasing of Microsoft Mesh, the company's new mixed-reality platform. Other developer-targeted sessions included an overview of Visual Studio 2019 and topics on Azure tools and services. All sessions are available on-demand for registered attendees.
.NET Notebooks in Visual Studio Code now supports T-SQL in addition to C#, F#, PowerShell, and HTML - the result of the collaboration between the .NET Interactive and Azure Data Studio teams. However, the official release was immediately followed by some skepticism from the public. User MgSam pointed out in the official release post that C# Interactive - a REPL editor first released for Visual Studio 2015 - has yet to be ported to .NET Core.
Jiachen Jiang, program manager at Microsoft, published a detailed overview of the NuGet ecosystem's state. The report took into account the last six months and resulted from a public survey on both the package authoring and consuming experiences. More than 100 developers were interviewed among a total of 500 participants. As part of the ongoing efforts to promote transparency and collect feedback from the public, the NuGet development team enabled GitHub Discussions on their main repository.
Another release from the NuGet team was a new functionality to scan NuGet packages for security vulnerabilities. All information on common vulnerabilities comes from the centralized GitHub Advisory Database. With the new functionality, NuGet will show package information containing the severity of the vulnerabilities detected and any recommended actions (for both package authors and consumers). The vulnerability detection functionality is also available in the .NET CLI. The minimum requirements for using the new feature are .NET SDK 5.0.200 and Visual Studio 2019 16.9 (Windows) or Visual Studio for Mac 8.8.
.NET Core 2.1 will reach the end of support on August 21th, 2021. After this date, Microsoft will no longer provide updates, security fixes, or technical support for this version. The company recommends that you migrate your application to .NET Core 3.1 or later before this date to continue to receive updates. It is important to note that the end-of-life announcement also applies to ASP.NET Core 2.1 on .NET Framework since it matches the support policy of the .NET Framework.
Microsoft also released new versions of Visual Studio 2019 for both Windows (v16.9) and Mac (v8.9). The releases contains multiple productivity and accessibility improvements. The Windows release includes a new dynamic instrumentation profiling tool for .NET and an improved search service using Azure AI/ML services. The new version for Mac now supports the Apple M1 chip via the Rosetta 2 translation layer.
Following its first major version's public availability, Cake also released a new version (v0.6.1) of Bakery, its script analyzer and code generator. Terminal.Gui (a terminal GUI toolkit for .NET) version 0.90 was also released on NuGet. This is the "Stable, Feature Complete" pre-release of version 1.0 (NuGet also contains pre-release versions of 1.0, identified with -pre in the version number).