The week in .NET – On .NET with Glenn Versweyveld, Protobuf.NET, Arizona Sunshine

Bertrand

January 4th, 2017

To read last week’s post, see The week in .NET – On .NET with Steve Smith, Jint, Blue Effect.

On .NET

Last week, I published another short interview from the MVP Summit, this time with Glenn Versweyveld about Kliva, his Strava client for Windows:

This week, I’ll publish the last of our MVP Summit interviews, in which Reed Copsey, Jr. told me about the F# Software Foundation and its new programs. Next week, we’ll resume our regular shows.

Package of the week: Protobuf.NET

Protocol Buffers, or Protobufs for short, are a serialization format invented by Google, that is popular for its performance and simplicity. Google’s C# library generates C# code from a Protobuf specification. Protobuf.NET takes a different approach, that is arguably more idiomatic, and closer to existing .NET serializers such as DataContractSerializer , by starting from C# code, using attributes to specify contracts.

The serialization and deserialization APIs are then very simple:

* NuGet: protobuf-net * GitHub: mgravell/protobuf-net

Game of the week: Arizona Sunshine

Arizona Sunshine is a post-apocalypse first-person shooter designed for virtual reality. Strap on your headset and jump into a zombie invested world, exploring freely, scavenging and battling flesh eating undead who need to be put back into their graves! Arizona Sunshine features over 25 different weapons that operate with real-life movements, multiple environments for exploration, a full-size single player campaign and co-op multiplayer.

Arizona Sunshine was created by Vertigo Games and Jaywalkers Interactive using C# and Unity. It is available on Steam for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

User group meeting of the week: HoloLens mixed reality experiences in Burlington, MA

The New England Microsoft Developers user group holds a meeting tonight, Thursday, January 5 in Burlington, MA, where Gavin Bauman will show you how to build mixed reality experiences with HoloLens.

.NET

ASP.NET

F

F# contributions: 118 Pull Requests from 17 contributors, 13 of which are community members.

New F# Language Proposals:

Check out the F# Advent Calendar for loads of great F# blog posts for the month of December.

Check out F# Weekly for more great content from the F# community.

Xamarin

Azure

Games

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, and the Xamarin section by Dan Rigby.

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 Chris Alcock’s The Morning Brew.