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.Net Conf 2024 Day 1 Live!

.Net Conf 2024 Day 1 Live!

Check back here live during .Net Conference 2024's day 1 to get our thoughts on the latest Blazor news.

First up, is the Keynote!

Key Note 9 AM - 10 AM
James Montemagno, Damian Edwards, Maddy Montaquila, Maria Naggaga, Steve Sanderson, Safia Abdalla, Daniel Roth, David Ortinau, Filisha Shah
.NET 9 is here elevating cloud-native and intelligent app development, focusing on productivity enhancements, streamlined deployments, and accelerated AI integration, ensuring superior performance for developers across various applications.
  • Parterned with Open AI, CoPilot
  • .Net Aspire Launch
  • Developed free training on Microsoft Learn
  • Over 420,000 packages on Nuget
  • Used in Microsoft 365, CoPilot and Xbox

Highligts in .Net 9

  • Productive
  • Simplified Blazor Authentication
  • Garbage collection, etc.
  • .net ASPIRE, AI, Etc.

.Net Aspire

  • Currated Packages for Cloud projects
  • Simplify building applications
  • Worked with Azure and AWS
  • Logs, metrics, developer dashboard
  • Demo
  • Built for distrbuted applications, microservices.

Lots of new AI support

.Net MAUI

  • Build applications with a single code base to target client environments.
  • Improved controls, and integrations.
  • Community controls and from vendors
  • Syncfusion toolkit for .net maui. Free and open source controls
  • Demo for .net maui with the sync fusion tool kit.

ASP.Net Core Web Development

  • Performance and Security ehancements
  • Built in Open API support
  • Improved tooling and debugging
  • Blazor WA applications are 25 percent faster
  • Pre-compression for static assets
  • MapStaticAssets instead of UseStaticFiles. Optimizes static file delivery. It is a dropin replacement. During build and publish they will be optimized. Need to refer to them differently to get optimized versions.
    • Auto fingerprinted so cache can be aggressive and prevent stale caching.
    • Heavy caching for the static assets
    • App load is very quick.
  • Server Interactive mode
  • Open API Support
  • Scalar UI to document and display the API on the web. How is this different than swagger support? Testing with Bruno.
  • Can veiw endpoint meta data during web exceptions on the developer exception page. Debugger to view headers. Dictionary debug view for headers.
AI Building Blocks 10:45 - 11:30
Most .NET apps can be made more powerful and productive through AI features, such as semantic search, auto-classification, summarization, translation, data extraction, and even chat-based assistants. But until now there's been no single standard representation for AI concepts within .NET itself, so developers needed to combine many unrelated APIs. Microsoft.Extensions.AI addresses this by providing a new set of standard APIs for AI services, including large language models (LLMs) running locally on your workstation or as hosted services, integrating with text embeddings, vector stores, and more. In this talk we'll demonstrate how these new standard abstractions let you combine multiple services that can easily be swapped and changed over time, and how you can plug into the internals for more advanced scenarios. By the end you'll be ready to start experimenting with new AI features in your own apps.

This talk was great and showed some more real world examples of how we might integrate AI into our applications. The chat bot examples were simple to develop and understand. I am still not convinced that these types of AI integrations provide the uiltity to cover the enormous cost that is involved, but it certainly is interesting.

What’s new in C# 13 11:30 - 12:15
Join Mads and Dustin from the C# design team as they take you through new features in C# 13 and beyond.

To be honest most of the talk went over my head and didn't really have much that was super relevant to Blazor developers

What’s new for ASP.Net Core and Blazor in .Net 9 12:15 - 1:00

Daniel Roth

In this session we'll go over all the improvements coming to ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 9, including various performance improvements, optimized static web asset handling, improved Blazor reconnection logic, built-in OpenAPI support, improved distributed caching, and much more!
  • .Net Aspire (will need to try this out later)
  • Service discovery
  • Aspire Orchestration
  • Need to look into how we can bring in containers as a dependency of a project to see if this solution will make sense.
  • Recommention experience is better in blazor server
  • Hybrid components for use with Maui
  • Can share components with different types of clients with MAUI at once.
  • Optimized static web assets - This looks great!
    • Precompression
    • Fingerprinting
    • Caching
    • Endpoint Routing - Can add authorization policies to static files if desired.
  • Open API Support with Scalar.
What’s new in .Net MAUI in .Net 9 1:00 - 1:45

David Ortinau, Rachel Kang (SHE/HER)

More and more companies are building mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI, and .NET 9 is now here to continue improving those business-critical app experiences. In this session we’ll introduce you to what’s new in .NET 9, how companies are being successful shipping production quality applications with .NET MAUI, and how you can get the most out of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
  • Live Preview!
  • Hot reload
What’s new in the .Net Runtime, Libraires, and SDK 1:45 - 2:30

Richard Lander, Immo Landwerth

Find out about some of the exciting features .NET 9 is bringing to the runtime, libraries, and SDK! The runtime includes dynamic adaptation to application sizes for garbage collection, new attribute models for feature switches, and numerous performance enhancements. The libraries see updates like nullable reference type annotations in System.Text.Json, new LINQ methods (CountBy and AggregateBy), and a new Base64Url class for URL-safe encoding. The SDK introduces workload sets, improved unit testing integration, and enhanced NuGet security audits. Come join us to learn about .NET features you can start using today in your .NET 9 applications!
  • Significant improvement on memory usage and requests per second.
  • Package vulnerability auiditing on transitive packages. Be prepared for more warnings during restore.
  • Modernized the terminal logging.
  • Dot net tooling roll forward
  • Publish to insecure container repositories
Performance Improvements in .NET 9 2:30 - 3:15

Stephen Toub

.NET 9 is the fastest .NET to date, with a huge number of performance improvements throughout the stack. In this session, we'll take a tour through some of these optimizations and see how .NET 9 will make your applications and services fly.
API-ly Ever After: OpenAPI in .NET 9 3:45 - 4:15

Safia Abdalla, Mike Kistler

In .NET 9, ASP.NET Core ships with built-in support for generating OpenAPI documents from minimal and controller-based APIs. In this session, we'll cover the key features of this new support, explore integration scenarios for OpenAPI, and discuss how your team can make the most of OpenAPI.

This talk I wasn't so sure about. .Net 8 already supports some fashion of Open API support with swagger and swashbuckle. I'm not sure what this offers beyond that, with the exception of swapping Scalar for Swagger. I'll need to dive more into what is going on here to see if it is worth it.

  • Open API Support for minimal APIs and custom APIs
  • Open API with Transformers
  • Generating Open API Documents Documentation
  • Can add summaries, descriptions, names etc to minimal APIs and those properties are picked up by the open API builder.
  • spectral open API linter
  • Open API Transformer - Applied to an Open API document to add/modify/delete

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