Official announcements

• Announcing .NET 5.0
  • We’re excited to release .NET 5.0 today and for you to start using it. It’s a major release — including C# 9 and F# 5 — with a broad set of new features and compelling improvements. It’s already in active use by teams at Microsoft and other companies, in production and for performance testing.
  • Download now
  • Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (from July)

• Announcing ASP.NET Core in .NET 5
  • ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 is loaded with lots of great new features and improvements.
  • What’s new in ASP.NET Core 5.0
  • Migrate from ASP.NET Core 3.1 to 5.0
  • Breaking changes for migration from version 3.1 to 5.0

• Announcing the Release of EF Core 5.0
  • The early releases of EF Core focused on building a flexible and extensible architecture. In EF Core 3.1, the team buttoned down this architecture with some breaking changes and an overhauled query pipeline. The foundation from 3.1 enabled the team and community to deliver an astonishing set of new features for EF Core 5.0.

• C# 9.0 on the record
  • It’s official: C# 9.0 is out! Back in May I blogged about the C# 9.0 plans, and the following is an updated version of that post to match what we actually ended up shipping. With every new version of C# we strive for greater clarity and simplicity in common coding scenarios, and C# 9.0 is no exception. One particular focus this time is supporting terse and immutable representation of data shapes.
  • YouTube: What’s New in C#? [27:45]

• Announcing F# 5
  • From F# 4.1 to F# 5, the chief focus for F# has been bringing up great support for .NET Core (now .NET 5). With F# 5, we’re considering this journey mostly complete.

Cloud Service Providers

• .NET 5 on App Service
  • We are happy to announce that App Service now supports .NET 5 applications across all public regions and scenarios on both Windows and Linux App Service plans. The App Service and .NET teams worked closely together to deliver this functionality on the same day as .NET 5 reached GA (see .NET 5 GA announcement). Going forward every new preview release of .Net 6 and beyond will be available on App Service on DAY 0 of it’s release.

• .NET 5 on AWS
  • In this post I’ll share ways customers can get more out of their .NET investments on AWS and highlight some of the services and tools that we have worked on to support .NET 5 in four areas covering compute, networking, developer tools and database.

Further reading

• .NET 5 is Here….Now What? (Mitchel Sellers)
  • Now that the release is real, what is next for the .NET ecosystem?

• C# 9 The unknown goodies (Miguel Bernard)
  • Discover all the hidden gems in C# 9 that nobody talks about. Module initializers simplified null check, covariant returns, and native sized integers

• Introducing C# 9: Questions & answers about Records (Anthony Giretti)
  • You have been many to ask me questions about the records in C# 9 I described in my latest article: https://anthonygiretti.com/2020/06/17/introducing-c-9-records/. In this article I will answer them for my greatest pleasure as well as yours

• EF Core 5 Many-to-Many Relationships (David Hayden)
  • If you’re a Microsoft developer using EF Core, you are probably really excited about the new feature in EF Core 5 that makes creating many-to-many relationships super simple! Many-to-many relationships in EF Core 5 work intuitively now, so if you have installed the .NET 5 SDK or Visual Studio 2019 16.9 preview 1 you can test the new feature pretty quickly from a .NET Core Console Application targeting .NET 5.

• Source Generators in .NET 5 with ReSharper (Matthias Koch)
  • One of the most exciting features in .NET 5 and C# 9 are source generators. They enable us to hook into the compilation pipeline that is executed for our projects, analyze source files that are to be compiled, and provide additional source code for our final assembly. In other words, we can take advantage of compile-time metaprogramming!
• Announcing PowerShell 7.1
  • We’re proud to announce the release of PowerShell 7.1, the latest major update to PowerShell 7. This release includes a number of improvements and fixes that build on top of the PowerShell 7.0 release in March and the recent GA release of .NET 5. Since then, the PowerShell Team (and many of you, our community contributors, thank you!) have been hard at work addressing some of the community’s top bug reports and feature requests.

There are numerous ways to check if the string is null or empty in C# (Meme by Lumi (@rnielikki) / Twitter)