The week in .NET – On .NET on Docker and new Core tooling, Benchmark.NET, Magicka

Bertrand

February 7th, 2017

Previous posts:

On .NET

In this week’s episode, we’re running ASP.NET in a Docker image, and we look at some of the changes in the .NET Core .csproj tooling. Apologies to those of you who watched live: we had some technical difficulties, and as a consequence, we did a second recording, which is now on Channel 9.

This week, we’ll have Phil Haack on the show. Phil works for GitHub, and before that was the Program Manager for ASP.NET MVC. We’ll stream live on Channel 9. We’ll take questions on Gitter’s dotnet/home channel and on Twitter. Please use the #onnet tag. It’s OK to start sending us questions in advance if you can’t do it live during the shows.

We’ll also record a couple of additional surprise interviews in preparation for the celebration of the 15th anniversary of .NET, and the 20th anniversary of Visual Studio. Stay tuned!

Package of the week: BenchmarkDotNet

When done properly, benchmarking is a great way to guide your engineering choices by comparing multiple solutions to a problem known to cause performance bottlenecks in your applications. There’s a lot of methodology involved if you want to do it right, however, that is both tricky and repetitive. And no, surrounding your code with a Stopwatch won’t cut it.

BenchmarkDotNet makes it very easy to decorate the code that you want to test so it can be discovered, run many times, and measured. BenchmarkDotNet takes care of warmup and cooldown periods as needed, and will compute mean running times and standard deviation for you. It can also generate reports in a variety of formats.

https://github.com/dotnet/BenchmarkDotNet

Game of the week: Magicka

Magicka is an action-adventure game set in a world based on Norse mythology. Take on the role of a wizard from a sacred order while you embark on a quest to stop an evil sorcerer who has thrown the world into turmoil. Magicka features a dynamic spell casting system that has you combining the elements to cast spells. You can also play with up to three of your friends in co-op and versus modes.

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Magicka was created by Arrowhead Game Studios using C# and XNA. It is available for Windows on Steam.

User group meeting of the week: C# 7 with Jon Skeet in Adelaide

If you’re around Adelaide on Wednesday, February 8, don’t miss the Adelaide .NET User Group‘s meetup with Jon Skeet on C# 7. Jon Skeet is none other than the #1 member on StackOverflow, and an absolute authority on C#.

.NET

ASP.NET

F

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

Xamarin

Azure

UWP

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, and the UWP section by Michael Crump.

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.