Now you can upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio! We are happy to introduce it as a Visual Studio extension and will upgrade your .NET Framework or .NET Core web- and desktop apps. In this video, Olia shows you how to get the extension and start to update your projects to the latest version of NET in minutes. 

A Tour of Go (golang) for the C# Developer

Learning other programming languages enhances our work in our primary language. From the perspective of a C# developer, the Go language (golang) has many interesting ideas. Go is opinionated on some things (such as where curly braces go and what items are capitalized). Declaring an unused variable causes a compile failure; the use of "blank identifiers" (or "discards" in C#) are common. Concurrency is baked right in to the language through goroutines and channels. Programming by exception is discouraged; it's actually called a "panic" in Go. Instead, errors are treated as states to be handled like any other data state. We'll explore these features (and others) by building an application that uses concurrent operations to get data from a service. These ideas make us think about the way we program and how we can improve our day-to-day work (in C# or elsewhere).

0:00 Welcome to Go
2:40 Step 1: Basics
12:20 Step 2: Calling a web service
23:35 Step 3: Parsing JSON
36:26 Step 4: "for" loops
41:00 Step 5: Interfaces and methods
50:05 Step 6: Time and Args
55:10 Step 7: Concurrency
1:07:10 Step 8: Errors
1:14:40 Step 9: Concurrency and errors
1:24:35 Where to go next 

.NET 8 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available and includes many great new improvements to ASP.NET Core!

This is the last release candidate that we plan to share before the final .NET 8 release later this year. Most of the planned features and changes for .NET 8 are part of this release candidate and are ready for you to try out. You can find the full list of what’s new in ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 in the docs. 

The first version of ASP.NET was released 17 years ago and during these years, it is fascinating to see how the ASP.NET team constructively reacted through these years to the major shifts happening on the web. Initially a platform that was closed and tried to hide and abstract the web; ASP.NET has metamorphized into an open source and cross platform - one that fully embraces the nature of the web. This is the first part of a series of 3 articles that will cover the history of ASP.NET from its launch to the latest ASP.NET Core releases.  

Explore ASP.NET Core SDK and tooling, look at .NET Core CLI, and learn how to build an ASP.NET Core app with Razor Pages MVC. Plus, get the details on logging and diagnostics. Find lots of cross-platform goodness and get .NET ready, as you learn more about this framework for building modern cloud-based web apps. Build your first ASP.NET project, and gear up for the intermediate ASP.NET Core course. 

As anyone in the .NET community who hasn't been living under a rock will know, there's a lot of exciting things happening with .NET at the moment with the announcement of the open source, cross platform, .NET Core. However, partly due to the very open nature of its evolution, there's been a whole host of names associated with its development - vNext, ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET Core, .NET generations etc.

In this post I'm going to try and clarify some of the naming and terminology surrounding the evolution of the .NET framework. I'll discuss some of the challenges the latest iteration is attempting to deal with and how the latest developments aim to address these.

This is really for those that have seen some of the big announcements but aren't sure about the intricacies of this new framework and how it relates to the existing ecosystem, which was my situation before I really started digging into it all properly!

Hopefully by the end of this article you'll have a clearer grasp of the latest in .NET! 

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! 

Bootstrap has become the world’s favorite framework for building responsive web-projects. With the Bootstrap 4 Beta release just around the corner, it is time to take a more detailed look at what the project has to offer, what has changed and what one can expect when migrating over from Bootstrap 3.