Some months ago a feature landed in Xamarin.Forms that seemed to truly polarize the Xamarin.Forms community: support for styling applications using CSS. Some argued that it was an unnecessary introduction to "Web" technology to the native development experience, and others that it simply isn't the right solution to the problem.  While I sympathize with the latter opinion and think there's plenty of room for some good debate on the right path forward, I count myself as part of a third camp: I think that CSS is a powerful (and frequently maligned) solution to the problem of styling native mobile applications.

For .NET and cloud developers, we’ve focused on improving the inner-loop dev experience. New .http/.rest files make it easier to test and iterate on your APIs directly in Visual Studio, while improved Dev Tunnels help streamline the configuration and management of your webhooks. We’ve also made it easier than ever to deploy your ASP.NET apps to containers.

Game developers can now view properties from base classes modified in an Unreal Blueprint asset without leaving the IDE. Visual Studio has improved the cross-platform development experience with a new remote file explorer, Linux Console output to the Integrated Terminal window, dev container improvements, and more.

Beyond individuals, Visual Studio also has new features to better support dev teams at scale, with exportable configuration files and a persistent update toggle helping ensure everyone on your team is working from the latest version of the tool.

This blog covers several of the top new features in Visual Studio 17.5—to see some in action, watch the Visual Studio 17.5 release video. As always lot of these features come straight from your feedback and suggestions. Your feedback is critical to help us make Visual Studio the best tool it can be! 

One of my favorite aspects of ASP.NET Core is that it is truly cross platform. And this extends to the developer experience as well. This videos discusses and demonstrates getting started with testing ASP.NET Core MVC applications using the cross-platform tools with the .NET Core SDK,  

Using Node.js, we can create web applications easily. Now, thanks to the node-webkit we can also create desktop apps with it, using a unique combination of HTML5 and Node. 

Jon P. Smith, author of Entity Framework Core in Action, explains what a multi-tenant app is and then digs into the things you need to do to make a multi-tenant app using ASP.NET Core with EF Core.

00:00 Countdown
02:19 Introduction and Community Links
18:25 What are multi-tenant web applications?
21:14 Single level multi-tenant demo
29:00 Partitioning tenants with EF Core QueryFilter
38:00 Admin features: creating users and tenants
43:00 Q&A
43:00 Hierarchical multi-tenant
59:00 How to get started
1:06:30 Database sharding and connection string management
1:16:30 Scaling with Azure SQL Elastic Pools
1:19:00 Conclusion
 

Learn React 18 with Redux Toolkit – Full Tutorial for Beginners
Learn how to use React version 18 and Redux Toolkit in this full course for beginners. React is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on components. 

New Breaking Changes

Angular now compiles with Ivy by default. See Ivy compatibility section.

Typescript 3.4 and 3.5 are no longer supported. Please update to Typescript 3.6.

tslib is now listed as a peer dependency rather than a direct dependency. Users not using the CLI will need to manually install tslib via yarn add tslib or npm install tslib --save. 

The latest update for Visual Studio 2022 is officially out. Offering a comprehensive suite of enhancements that span productivity, programming languages, and enterprise management, this general release is a monumental step forward. Developed with extensive user feedback, this version is fully compatible with .NET 8, which is also generally available as of today. 

Entity Framework Core for Beginners - 5 part video series with full source code, notes, code tours, and a dev container.