AlterNats VS dotnet

I have had the pleasure of contributing to a couple different networked drivers with very talented maintainers that I like to use as references.

One supports a wide array of Framework versions and has both Sync and Async I/O, as it must to implement the ADO.NET database driver interfaces. Reading the internals really highlight the way that .NET has evolved over the years and what must be done in each target version to maximize performance:

https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector

The other supports .NET 6 only with Async I/O only. This support policy seems to be the way that "modern" .NET development is headed, as .NET 6 will be the floor for LTS .NET (formerly .NET Core) releases in a few months. Async APIs only greatly simplify development, and make it simpler to remain performant when targeting WASM.

https://github.com/Cysharp/AlterNats

As a library maintainer, one thing I often wonder about is how to indicate .NET version support. One option would be for the major version of the library to track the major version of .NET, so if I were to publish a new library today then start with .NET 6 support and start with version number 6.0.0 instead of 1.0.0. This would limit the library to only making breaking changes when the .NET version changes though.

Microsoft .NET Blog: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/

Just find some good sites, that keep up with the news/changelogs ( one that I like for c# / dotnet stuff is is: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/) as well as the whole c# roadmap on github and where they propose features, and design meetings (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/meetings). It provides a lot of insight on what they plan on doing with the language). That's usually where I go to keep up with c# stuff.

Microsoft's .NET blog is pretty good for seeing what they're up to.

The .NET Blog has great articles about new and upcoming changes.

how exactly does dotnet 5 acheive this? it makes sense for dotnet 6 since we have different TFM's like net6.0-android, net6.0-ios, net6.0-macos etc. however, if you look for dotnet 5 you only have net5.0 and net5.0-windows TFMs as per given link, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/frameworks also somebody asked the question how to run .net 5 app on android and the answer given was to preferably still use xamarin/mono, https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet/issues/1253 Also what exactly did change in this regard, does it use same core clr, does it use the same base class library as one used in dotnet core?

Bookmark https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/ and read occasionally. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh... is good for a quick overview of language features depending on what version you're at.

Most .NET devs only need to be peripherally aware of these changes, as most businesses using .NET will move slower than Core's new pacing. It's even less important for lower seniority devs as you typically need project changes to utilize new features, which is a call a senior would make, which involves approval/testing/deployment, so a slow process which gives you time to read up on the new features as they're needed.

You're better at your "craft" the more tools you know about and how to apply them, but if your day job prevents you from following the new stuff, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

>I feel .NET Core after a good start is falling into the typical Microsoft trap of constantly cranking out new stuff to do the same thing and leaving it to developers to keep up.

Yeah, the pacing has increasing dramatically from .NET Framework days, but that's probably a good thing. I would just stick to learning about what you do in your day job. .NET has a huge ecosystem compared to other languages, so it's going to be very hard to keep up with everything MAUI is doing if you're doing regular ASP.NET core APIs.

Release Notes

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