Who's using .NET "Core"? (As well as a bit of an introduction...)

[DualBrain]

I'm interested in engaging with others that are developing on .NET (formally known as "Core" and now simply as .NET 5+)... so who else here is actively doing any development on this platform? What kind of development? Are you interested in the cross-platform opportunities/capabilities or are there other reasons?

I'll start...

A lot of what I do is typically Windows Forms type projects that are .NET 7 / .NET 8 and heavily leverage the UI components from DevExpress as well as other various libraries / nuget packages.

With the "professional" work out of the way, let's move on to my pet/personal projects...

In order to better facilitate cross-platform development where I'm not *restricted* by what is in the VB runtime; I maintain the Community.VisualBasic alternative runtime (a "fork" of the Microsoft.VisualBasic runtime, available on GitHub). I've been working on a not complicated "can I just simply draw some pixels to the screen" approach to cross-platform development and this is taking shape as the vbPixelGameEngine (which is heavily inspired by the olc : : PixelGameEngine written in C/C++). I also have a few other open-source projects that I maintain/contribute to on GitHub; you can check these out at DualBrain - Overview

I'm certainly interested in collaborating, contributing and accepting contributions on VB-related open-source projects.

 

[JohnH]

My personal tools are upgraded to .Net 7, haven't got around to update to .Net 8, I'm guessing that is quickly done.
I also have a .Net Framework windows service and a .Net Standard library in otherwise .Net 7 solution, since the .Net Worker service is not available to VB. I may rewrite the service in C# perhaps.

Programming is not my profession, but I have written some tools for office work that is still .Net Framework, there's no hurry to upgrade them and I have no time to do it. Also have a couple of VSTOs that must be .Net Framework.

 

[jmcilhinney]

We still maintain a number of .NET Framework applications but we do mostly ASP.NET MVC apps and all new work is .NET Core. We're in the process of releasing a .NET 6 app. We were a fair way into development when .NET 7 became viable but, given that we'd have to upgrade to .NET 8 anyway, we chose to skip 7. .NET 8 was released too close to the scheduled release date so we've stuck with 6 for now and will upgrade to 8 in about 6 months or so.

 

[DualBrain]

My personal tools are upgraded to .Net 7, haven't got around to update to .Net 8, I'm guessing that is quickly done.
I also have a .Net Framework windows service and a .Net Standard library in otherwise .Net 7 solution, since the .Net Worker service is not available to VB. I may rewrite the service in C# perhaps.

Eeekkk... convert to C#?

Seeing this (combined with another recent conversation I had with some other VB contributors), I've spun up a new resource for us VB'ers.

GitHub - CommunityVB/Templates: The *missing* (and new) project, item, multi-project, web and multi-item `dotnet new` templates for Visual Basic.

The *missing* (and new) project, item, multi-project, web and multi-item `dotnet new` templates for Visual Basic. - GitHub - CommunityVB/Templates: The *missing* (and new) project, item, multi-proj...

github.com

The eventual goal is to have these published as more easily installable `dotnet new` entries; but for now you can copy the code for `Worker Service` directly under:

Templates/src/vbworker/content/vbworker at main · CommunityVB/Templates

The *missing* (and new) project, item, multi-project, web and multi-item `dotnet new` templates for Visual Basic. - CommunityVB/Templates

github.com

(You don't need the `.template.config` folder unless you plan on installing the template manually.)

To actually install the template manually, you can get a clone the repo locally, change to the `/src/vbworker` folder and type `dotnet new install .\`. This will provide you with the `vbworker` project type. ;-)

(Full disclosure... I've done minimal testing on this and haven't really had a need to work with `Worker Service` thus far; with that said, I'm happy to work through the template issues if you happen to find any issue.)

Hope this helps.