The week in .NET – Happy Birthday .NET with Chris Sells, free ASP.NET Core book, We are the Dwarves

Previous posts:

• Happy birthday .NET with Robin Cole, TinyORM, 911 Operator
• .NET Framework 4.7, reference documentation, On .NET on modular ASP.NET, Happy birthday .NET with Immo Landwerth, JustAssembly
• On .NET on SonarLint and SonarQube, Happy birthday .NET with Dan Fernandez, nopCommerce, Steve Gordon

Happy birthday .NET with Chris Sells

In February, we threw a big .NET birthday bash with Microsoft Alumni and product teams. We caught up with Chris Sells who is currently a Product Manager at Google, and before that a Program Manager at Microsoft. Chris has been part of the .NET developer community since the beginning and he tells us a few great stories in this fun interview.

Book of the week: ASP.NET Core succinctly, by Simone Chiaretta and Ugo Lattenzi

In ASP.NET Core Succinctly, seasoned authors Simone Chiaretta and Ugo Lattanzi update you on all the advances provided by Microsoft’s landmark framework. Learn the foundations of the library, understand the new versions of ASP.NET MVC and Web API, and you’ll have everything you need to build .NET web applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You can get the book now, for free!

Game of the Week: We are the Dwarves

We are the Dwarves is a real-time tactical adventure game. Set in a world where the Dwarven stars are slowly dying, you must guide three astronauts through their expedition to find a new star in the depths of the Endless Stone. Each dwarf has individual abilities and skill trees, letting you customize to your play style. Pay close attention to the hostile environment as you lay out your tactical strategy when fighting your enemies.

We are the Dwarves was created by Whale Rock Games using C# and Unity. It is available Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Meetup of the week: Productivity in Visual Studio 2017 with GitHub, .NET Core, and Docker in San Francisco, CA

The Bay .NET user group has a two-part meeting on Thursday, April 27 at 6:30PM featuring excellent speakers: Sara Ford will talk about the GitHub extension for Visual Studio 2017, and Beth Massi will tell you all about .NET Core, Docker, and microservices.

.NET

• Announcing SignalR 2.2.2 (Preview 1) by Jon Galloway.
• High-performance .NET by example: Filtering bot traffic by Alexandr Nikitin.
• I was wrong, reflecting on the .NET design choices by Ayende Rahien.
• The Definitive Serialization Performance Guide by Alois Kraus.
• Covariant and Contravariant Casting is 3x Slower than Dynamic, and Better Benchmarking with Additive and Multiplicative Baselines by Daniel Crabtree.
• Creating custom build configurations for the .NET Core project format by Pedro Lamas.
• Stop overusing interfaces by Tor Hovland.
• BatMap – The Mapper we deserve, not the one we need by Doğuş Teknoloji.
• Registering an Application to a URI Scheme using .NET by Gérald Barré.
• Multiple Platform Targeting in Visual Studio 2017 by Jason Roberts.

ASP.NET

• ASP.NET Core 12 samples by Piotr Gankiewicz.
• Removing the MVC Razor dependencies from the Web API template in ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock.
• Creating a basic Web API template using dotnet new custom templates by Andrew Lock.
• Fluent Validation Rules with ASP.NET Core by Cecil Phillip.
• ASP.NET Core Lazy Command Pattern by Muhammad Rehan Saeed.
• Configuring ASP.NET Core middleware by Michał Dymel.
• Hosting a .NET Core 2 Web API on the Raspberry Pi 3 by Jeremy Lindsay.
• ASP.NET Core Dependency Injection Understands Unbound Generics by K. Scott Allen.
• ASP.NET Core Middleware Components are Singletons by K. Scott Allen.
• Cache Dependency in ASP.NET Core by Hisham Bin Ateya.
• ASP.NET Core Health Checks by Allan Hardy.
• Using Storyteller with ASP.Net Core Systems by Jeremy D. Miller.
• Domain Command Patterns – Validation by Jimmy Bogard.
• Dependency Injection in the ASP.NET Core Middleware by Michał Dymel.
• Areas in ASP.NET Core by Gaston Verelst.

C#

• C# 7 ValueTuple types and their limitations by Joseph Woodward.
• What is NullReferenceException? Object reference not set to an instance of an object by Matt Watson.
• Void-Free Style in C# 7.0 by Lukáš Lánský.
• A tricky bit of code by Ayende Rahien.

F#

The F# weekly is taking a break this week, but F# links will be back next week.

Xamarin

• Xamarin Stable Release: 15.1 Hotfix iOS Simulator v1.0.2 by Bri Brothers.
• Xamarin Alpha Release: 15.2 Alpha Preview 3 by Bri Brothers.
• Preview: Bringing macOS to Xamarin.Forms by David Ortinau.
• Go from Sketch to Rapid Prototype and Manufacturing with Blank Slate’s Xamarin-Based Zotebook by Lacey Butler.
• Guest Post: Adding a Calendar to Your Xamarin.Forms Apps with the Telerik Calendar by Sam Basu.
• Requesting Reviews with iOS 10.3’s SKStoreReviewController by James Montemagno.
• Important OnPlatform Changes in Xamarin.Forms by James Montemagno.
• Snack Pack 10: Planet Xamarin – Community Blog Feed by The Xamarin Show.
• Xamarin.Tips – Removing the Bottom Border of Your iOS Navigation Bars by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Tips – Android Bar Background Images in Xamarin.Forms by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Tips – MVVM Light Set Expressions Explained by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Tips – Fixing the Highlighting Drop In Your Xamarin.Forms Projects by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Controls – Android ArcLayout by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Forms: Consuming Rest Webservice – JSON Parsing (C# – Xaml) by Subramanyam Raju.
• Xamarin.Forms: Consuming Rest Webservice – XML Parsing (C# – Xaml) by Subramanyam Raju.
• Xamarin Forms – Change a ListView’s Selected Item Colour by John Wilson.
• Building a hybrid app with Xamarin.Forms by Gerald Versluis.
• Hybrid Xamarin.Forms Applications by Jason Farrell.
• Multiple Platform Targeting in Visual Studio 2017 by Jason Roberts.
• Share Dialog with Xamarin Forms by Adam Pedley.
• Six Disastrous Mistakes for Cross-Platform Mobile Projects by Lee Richardson.

Azure

• Azure Functions Tools Roadmap by Andrew B Hall.
• Detecting faces on photos using Microsoft Cognitive Services by Gunnar Peipman.

UWP

• Windows Developers at Microsoft Build 2017 by Windows Apps Team.
• Building a Telepresence App with HoloLens and Kinect by Windows Apps Team.
• Windows Developer Awards: Honoring Windows Devs at Microsoft Build 2017 By Windows Apps Team.
• Just released – Windows developer evaluation virtual machines – April 2017 build By Clint Rutkas.

Data

• Using Entity Framework Core in-memory database for unit testing by Gunnar Peipman.

Game Development

• [Ludum Dare] What’s next? Helping you! Judging Friday
• 7 memorable boss fights that every developer should study by Richard Moss.
• Making Horizon Zero Dawn’s Machines feel like living creatures by Willie Clark.
• The Design in Narrative Design by Jurie Horneman.
• Level Design Basics by Muhammad Ayub.
• Weapon Switching – Unity Tutorial by Brackeys.
• [Unity 5.5] Tutorial: How to create depth of field in unity (like in GTA) by Gamad.

And this is it for this week!

Contribute to the week in .NET

As always, this weekly post couldn’t exist without community contributions, and I’d like to thank all those who sent links and tips. The F# section is provided by Phillip Carter, the gaming section by Stacey Haffner, the Xamarin section by Dan Rigby, and the UWP section by Michael Crump.

You can participate too. Did you write a great blog post, or just read one? Do you want everyone to know about an amazing new contribution or a useful library? Did you make or play a great game built on .NET?
We’d love to hear from you, and feature your contributions on future posts:

• Send an email to beleroy at Microsoft,
• Comment on this gist
• Leave us a pointer in the comments section below.
• Send Stacey (@yecats131) tips on Twitter about .NET games.

This week’s post (and future posts) also contains news I first read on The ASP.NET Community Standup, on Weekly Xamarin, on F# weekly, and on The Morning Brew.