How to get to know the latest dotnet features - the nerdy way
If you want to be up to date with dotnet development, you can obviously follow the official blogs from Microsoft and release notes. But what if you want to pick into the future or smaller details that aren't released or covered? Then let's go to GitHub!
Runtime
In the runtime repository you will find all the base library for dotnet (that includes LINQ, Task, List and so on). The magic often is inside the issues tab. Of course if you open that, you will be created with many many many things (at the time I am writing things almost 10k open issues and 60k closed ones).
To know what is going in with the next release (dotnet 10) we have to use the milestone filter:
There you can already see that we have sorted out a lot. So with this you can already skim through the stuff. You could sort by reactions (thumbs up and so on) to see where the community is at or just look with different other keywords in the filter.
But there is also another way to drill down into specific topics, meet
Label Filters
We can also use the label: filter to narrow down what we are looking for:
They are describing the area the change could be in. I will list here a few very interesting ones (also I will add the link to that area in dotnet 10 on GitHub if you want to check the links):
- api-approved: Newly added public API (that could be in any area like LINQ, System.Console and so on, so you might want to add another label - yes you can do that - to find the gem you are looking for)
- api-suggestion: This is the step before the api is approved. So if you go to the tracker and propose a new public API, it would get that label.
- area-System.Linq: Well, all things LINQ related. Be it new API's (aka cool new toys to play with) or some change requests
- area-System.Collection: All things related to friends like
List<T>,Dictionaryand so on - tenet-performance: If you want to get a heads up on Stephen Toub performance blog post, "just" skim through all the Issues or PRs related to performance implications on the next version.
There are many more and I encourage you to check what's going on if you are interested.
Products like Entity Framework or ASP.NET live in their own respective GitHub repository where you can do similiar things. Also the csharp language repository can be crawled through. I can make a follow up post on how to search through on those repos.