So when Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016 and started integrating the Xamarin Visual Studio plugins more with the standard VS features, I knew I had to try and switch over to take advantage of the powerful IDE and language. Some of the immediate benefits I gained from the switch are:

• Simple asynchronous programming
• Access to powerful plugins like ReSharper
• Freedom to work in Windows or OSX
• Access to powerful debugging tools for the Android on Windows (debugging iOS on Mac side is good but can be buggy).
• Access to built in NuGet package management for third party libraries 

This project is an attempt to build re-usable charts and chart components for d3.js without taking away the power that d3.js gives you. This is a very young collection of components, with the goal of keeping these components very customizeable, staying away from your standard cookie cutter solutions. 

Scratch.js is a standalone library with no external dependencies which brings interactivity to your website by allowing you to generate scratch cards for your visitors.
Based on HTML5, scratch.js generate canvas on the fly and is optimized for all modern browsers and has touch support for mobile devices. You can use it to make scratch cards, coupons, promotionnal game and even advertisement.

In this section, I’m going to cover how you can use SignalR outside of a Hub. In most asp.net core applications, you will likely want to communicate with the connect clients from within your application but outside of a Hub. You can accomplish this by using the HubContext.

For example, an ASP.NET Core MVC Controller or any other class that is instantiated by ASP.NET Core’s Dependency Injection.

The HubContext allows you to send messages to your connected clients. It has many of the same features to communicate with clients as when you are inside of a Hub.  

TogetherJS is a service for your website that makes it surprisingly easy to collaborate in real-time.
Using TogetherJS two people can interact on the same page, seeing each other's cursors, edits, and browsing a site together. The TogetherJS service is included by the web site owner, and a web site can customize and configure aspects of TogetherJS's behavior on the site.  Demo

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) is one of the most popular features for developers on Windows 10 and 11. It has recently been made available on Windows Server 2022. With this addition, you can now run Linux containers on WSL 2 on Windows Server 2022 for development and testing purposes. 

Entity Framework half-heartedly supported Domain-Driven Design patterns. But the new-from-scratch EF Core has brought new hope for developers to map your well-designed domain classes to a database, reducing the cases where a separate data model is needed. EF Core 2.1 is very DDD friendly, even supporting things like fully encapsulated collections, backing fields and the return of support for value objects. In this session, we'll review some well-designed aggregates and explore how far EF Core 2.1 goes to act as the mapper between your domain classes and your data store. 

Read the web like Right-to-Left readers do, and learn about the challenges — and how to help solve them.  

The Problem

What they neglect to say is all that testability and persistence ignorance flies right out the window when you create a new ASP.NET Web Application using the MVC template and "Individual User Accounts" authentication. What you get is a single-layered application, tightly coupled to Entity Framework, that:

• Ignores the patterns that facilitate testing, including: the repository pattern, unit of work pattern, and dependency injection;

• Forces you to implement their IUser interface in your application’s User entity, thereby coupling it to ASP.NET Identity;

• Eliminates any clear separation between your entities, persistence concerns, and business logic. Persistence ignorance? Forget about it.

Thankfully, due to the extensibility designed into ASP.NET Identity, it is possible to ditch the reference to the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework assembly and write a custom implementation that can address these and other architectural issues. Just be forewarned: it is not a trivial undertaking, and you’ll have to put up with some code smell that is baked into the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core assembly. 

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!