2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
CODE Focus - Power Platform 2023 is a special collection of articles written primarily by Microsoft MVPs covering major features of Microsoft Power Platform with a look ahead as Copilot is about to be released, and enable business technologists and professional developers. If you are new to Power Platform, Copilot can easily help you get started. If you are a professional developer, Power Platform can help business people on your team write a lot of a new application. You only need to advise on data decisions and adjust some things for connection and deployment. Your whole team gets better.
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Coding the Future: The Rise of Low-Code and AI with the Microsoft Power Platform
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Charles Lamanna argues that Microsoft Power Platform democratizes software development by combining low-code tools with AI copilots, empowering non-coders and seasoned developers alike to collaboratively create solutions. He highlights Power Platform’s components (Power Apps, Automate, BI, Pages, Virtual Agents) and the universal Power Fx language, with Dataverse enabling compliant data management. Lamanna envisions a future where AI accelerates and broadens who can innovate, reshaping collaboration across domains and industries as citizens-developers contribute to a galactic odyssey of digital transformation.
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The Future of Low-Code / No-Code Power Platform Development in the Age of Copilot
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Lewis Baybutt argues that the integration of generative AI and Copilot with Microsoft’s Power Platform is transforming software development from a constrained, expert-driven practice into a broad, democratized activity. He traces the shift from traditional coding to low-code and RAD, enabled by AI-assisted design, automated flows, and data-driven apps, while highlighting the role of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and related tools in empowering citizen developers and professionals alike. The piece also stresses governance, lifecycle management, and responsible AI as essential guardrails in this nascent AI-enabled era.
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Phillip’s Power Apps Odyssey
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Shane Young narrates Phillip’s odyssey to illustrate how Microsoft Power Apps can transform a simple Excel spreadsheet into a responsive, data-rich mobile app, bridging citizen development with professional engineering. Through Phillip’s trials—importing data, calibrating data types, adding a barcode scanner, querying external APIs via a custom connector, and embedding a PCF control—Young shows how end users can rapidly build usable apps while recognizing when pro developers are needed to handle JSON, APIs, and advanced components. The tale underlines Power Apps’ potential to democratize app creation and scale with expert collaboration.
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Using Power Automate to Manage Process
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Angelo Gulisano surveys how Microsoft Power Automate, including its Desktop variant, enables users of varying coding skill to design cloud and desktop flows that automate complex business processes by connecting services, extracting data with AI Builder, storing results in Dataverse, and notifying teams via Teams. Through two practical examples—processing an invoice from email attachments and automating data from legacy desktop apps—he demonstrates building automated workflows, leveraging Copilot to generate flows, and expanding automation across integrations, with guidance on testing, deployment, and real‑world applicability.
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Power Platform ❤ Code Developers
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
David Yack argues that traditional code developers remain essential in the Power Platform ecosystem by leveraging familiar skills to extend a low-code environment built on Azure. He emphasizes extensibility without cliffs through APIs, connectors, PCF components, and Dataverse plugins, and highlights practical tooling (Power Platform CLI, VS Code extension) and API-first integration to bring custom logic into low-code flows. Yack also champions fusion teams that blend makers and developers to accelerate solutions, encouraging code professionals to engage, contribute connectors and plugins, and deepen their understanding of the platform.
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Powering Up Power BI: 7 Seamless Integrations with the Power Platform
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
John P. White surveys seven seamless integrations between Power BI and the Power Platform that extend analytics into action. He covers how to automate dataset refreshes (scheduled or event-driven with Power Automate), achieve real-time reporting via Dataverse DirectQuery, enable writeback through the Power Apps visual, push live form results with Forms, alert and automate responses from dashboard tiles, and implement data-driven subscriptions through Flow. White highlights trade-offs (licensing, latency, DirectQuery limitations) and practical steps to implement each pattern, underscoring how these integrations turn insights into timely, cross-platform actions.
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Power Fx: Low Code for Everyone
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Greg Lindhorst introduces Power Fx, Microsoft’s open-source, Excel-like low-code language that extends the spreadsheet model to let both novice makers and pro developers author apps, automation, and server triggers; embeddable via C# SDK and a React formula bar, it supports declarative and imperative logic, strongly-typed checks, connectors (including Dataverse and REST), safe server execution, and tooling for integration and IntelliSense—enabling democratized, maintainable business logic authoring across platforms.
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The Rise of the Low-Code Ecosystem
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Chris Huntingford argues that we are entering an era of enablement driven by low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform, where not only professional developers but citizen developers and business technologists collaboratively solve real business problems. He traces the shift from technology-centric digital transformation to people-centric enablement, emphasizing reusable digital bricks, governance, data modeling (Dataverse), and cross-role collaboration. Through real-world examples and a multi-perspective stance, he shows how diverse roles—citizen developers, business technologists, and professionals—co-create scalable solutions, with AI and Copilot poised to further lower barriers and expand impact.
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The Power of Power Pages to Create a Business Website
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2023 - Vol. 20 - Issue 1 - Power Platform
Fabio Franzini surveys Microsoft Power Pages as a fast, flexible, low‑code platform for building public-facing and partner portals, internal sites, and B2B/B2C experiences. He highlights how Copilot enhances design and iteration, and covers the design studio, Liquid templating, PCF components, web templates, and Web API integrations, enabling both power users and professional developers to customize data-driven portals. The article also addresses authentication, security, governance, ALM via CI/CD and pipelines, and governance tooling, illustrating broad use cases and practical steps to create, manage, and deploy Power Pages solutions.
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New in .NET 7
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Rod Paddock argues that .NET 7 advances the platform with strong developer-centric improvements across languages, frameworks, and tooling. He highlights C# 11 features like raw string literals, MAUI’s strengthened cross-platform capabilities, and Blazor's expanded interoperability and hot-reload experience. He emphasizes sustained performance gains, and valuable EF enhancements that streamline data-centric development. Paddock frames these updates as part of a coherent forward and backward-compatible trajectory, designed to meet developers where they are and preserve prior sweat investments while enabling new capabilities. The result is a highly productive, future-proof .NET ecosystem.
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What’s New in .NET 7
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
In "What’s New in .NET 7," Jon Douglas highlights the latest .NET release focusing on significant performance improvements, enhanced cloud-native capabilities, and developer productivity boosts through features like C# 11, .NET MAUI, and built-in container support. The article emphasizes easier modernization of legacy apps, optimized ARM64 performance, enriched observability, and the introduction of Native AOT for faster startup and smaller deployments. Jon conveys that .NET 7 builds on prior unification efforts to empower developers to build any application across platforms with improved runtime, libraries, and tooling, making it Microsoft's fastest and most versatile .NET release yet.
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What’s New in C# 11
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Bill Wagner explains that C# 11 organizes its advances around four themes—improved developer productivity, object initialization and creation, generic math support, and runtime performance—with the first two likely most impactful in everyday code. He surveys features such as raw string literals, newlines in interpolations, UTF-8 string literals, pattern matching on Span, and list patterns to make code more concise and readable; plus required members, auto-default structs, extended nameof scope, and generic attributes to improve object initialization. He also highlights runtime-focused enhancements like ref fields, file-local types, and cached delegate conversions that boost performance.
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Highlighted Performance Wins with .NET 7
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Stephen Toub surveys the standout performance gains in .NET 7, arguing that no single change dominates, but a collection of targeted innovations—most notably on-stack replacement (OSR) for tiered JIT compilation, a Regex source generator that delivers compile-time equivalents of compiled regexes without JIT, and extensive vectorization in LINQ and core APIs—collectively yield substantial speedups. He illustrates how OSR accelerates loops, how compile-time regex generation aids environments without JIT, and how fixed-width vectors unlock dramatic throughput, urging developers to adopt .NET 7 and measure gains.
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Use .NET MAUI for Native, No-Compromise Apps
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
David Ortinau argues that .NET MAUI lets .NET developers build high-performance, native-feeling mobile and desktop apps from a single multi-targeted project, reusing existing .NET skills and libraries, simplifying resources, lifecycle, and platform integration, and enabling Blazor hybrid UI, strong tooling (hot reload, Live Preview) and enterprise patterns to accelerate cross-platform app delivery with no compromise.
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Minimal APIS: Stuck in the Middleware Again
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Shawn Wildermuth argues that middleware—long a core of ASP.NET Core—can and should be leveraged with Minimal APIs, not just controllers. He explains how middleware works, how Minimal APIs opt into it via fluent extension methods (e.g., RequireAuthorization, AllowAnonymous, RequireCors, Produces, WithName), and demonstrates common patterns for CORS, Swagger/OpenAPI metadata, and caching. When a middleware doesn’t natively support Minimal APIs, attributes remain a fallback. Wildermuth’s goal is to show how to compose middleware with Minimal APIs to enrich functionality while preserving simplicity.
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EF Core 7: It Just Keeps Getting Better
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Julie Lerman surveys EF Core 7’s notable advances—focused on substantial performance optimizations, true bulk ExecuteUpdate/ExecuteDelete, JSON column mapping, stored-procedure mapping, new interceptors (including materialization), richer provider-specific aggregates, improved convention customization, and greater EF6 parity—arguing these features make EF Core 7 a faster, more flexible, and production-ready platform worth adopting even on .NET 6 LTS.
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Upgrade Tooling for .NET 7
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
Mike Rousos surveys the expanded toolkit for migrating from .NET Framework to .NET 7, detailing new and improved upgrade tools and how they fit together. He explains Upgrade Assistant’s binary analysis and in-place upgrades for libraries and desktop apps, introduces ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling for gradually moving ASP.NET apps to ASP.NET Core, and presents System.Web Adapters to interoperate and share code between frameworks. The article also outlines practical upgrade steps, deployment considerations, and an ecosystem roadmap, urging community feedback to evolve the tooling.
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Using CoreWCF to Move WCF Services to .NET Core
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
In this article, Sam Spencer explains how CoreWCF, an open-source community-driven project, facilitates the modernization of legacy WCF services by porting them to the cross-platform .NET Core framework. He outlines CoreWCF’s architecture, leveraging ASP.NET Core hosting and middleware, and describes how it preserves existing WCF contracts and data contracts while offering partial support for traditional bindings and configurations. Spencer details practical migration approaches, client support, and current limitations, emphasizing that CoreWCF provides a practical and supported pathway for enterprises to modernize WCF-dependent applications without a complete redesign.
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Blazor for the Web and Beyond in .NET 7
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0
In this article, Daniel Roth summarizes how .NET 7 advances Blazor into a more productive, interoperable platform for building cross‑platform web and native apps—highlighting new features like Blazor custom elements, improved data‑binding modifiers, navigation locking, dynamic auth requests, a WebAssembly loading UI, empty templates, richer hot‑reload and debugging, expanded crypto, low‑level JS<->.NET interop, and Blazor Hybrid with .NET MAUI—positioning Blazor as a mature, modern choice for UI across browsers, mobile, and desktop.
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.NET Focus Features Fabulous Features
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
Rod reflects on this being the third CODE Focus issue he has managed and highlights some of the great articles about .NET 6 in this issue.
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The Unified .NET 6
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
There were many lessons learned as the .NET team released .NET 5 during the lockdown with an all-remote team. Rich shows how those lessons carried into .NET 6 with major performance improvements, multiple operating system scenarios for building client apps, support for Apple Silicon chips, and faster and more responsive development tools.
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Bring Your .NET Apps Forward with the .NET Upgrade Assistant
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
Now that you’re using all the shiny new tools in .NET 6, you need to make sure that the rest of your .NET Framework is keeping up. Mike shows you how the new Upgrade Assistant does some of that work for you; but you'll have some work to do yourself.
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Visual Studio 2022 Productivity
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
VS 2022 is finally 64-bit! Mika shows you how, with enhanced speed, AI coding assistance, expanded productivity tools, and streamlined team collaboration, you’ll find this new version improving your workdays.
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Essential C# 10.0: Making it Simpler
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
It’s time for the annual release of C# vNext. Mark shows you how it’s streamlined in some ways and tightened in others. In fact, he thinks it will mark a sea change in how C# devs write code.
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What’s New in ASP.NET Core in .NET 6
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
You already know that ASP.NET Core provides everything you need to build great Web UIs and powerful back-end services. Daniel shows how you can build rich interactive client Web UIs using all your favorite interactivity tools, standards-based HTTP APIs, real-time services, and back-end services.
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EF Core 6: Fulfilling the Bucket List
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
Julie Lerman surveys EF Core 6 as a curated “bucket list” release, highlighting how the team prioritized long-desired enhancements across performance, modeling, migrations, and provider support. She emphasizes dramatic query speed gains, startup-model pre-compilation, standalone migrations bundles, and native temporal-table support, along with bulk configuration, expanded GroupBy capabilities, and Cosmos DB improvements such as implicit ownership and richer logging. The article blends practical how-tos with context on planning transparency and community feedback, illustrating EF Core 6 as a thoughtful evolution that narrows gaps with EF6 while expanding nonrelational support.
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An Introduction to .NET MAUI
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
Steven Thewissen surveys .NET MAUI as the evolution of Xamarin.Forms, outlining how MAUI consolidates cross-platform development by unifying UI with a single .NET 6 base and replacing renderers with a leaner handlers architecture. He explains architectural reshaping (interfaces, explicit handler registration, and a mapper for property changes), the adoption of the .NET Generic Host, and the new Single Project resource model. The article also covers migration paths for existing Xamarin.Forms apps, compatibility with existing renderers, and the future openness and ecosystem potential of MAUI.
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Blazor Hybrid Web Apps with .NET MAUI
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
In this article, Ed Charbeneau explores the Blazor Hybrid pattern enabled by .NET MAUI, highlighting how it allows developers to build cross-platform native applications for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows using familiar .NET and Blazor technologies. He contrasts Blazor Hybrid with other desktop Blazor options like PWAs and Electron, emphasizing its superior performance, native API access, and unified codebase. Ed details how the BlazorWebView component integrates Blazor UI within native apps and discusses migration paths from existing desktop frameworks. Overall, the article showcases Blazor Hybrid as a powerful evolution for .NET developers seeking to create modern, multi-platform applications.
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Power Up Your Power Apps with .NET 6 and Azure
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0
Power Apps help design and specify how a mobile app will function without having to know all those troublesome details of being a professional coder. Come along as Brady walks you through .NET 6’s new ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, then publishes the app to Azure App Service, imports it into Azure API Managements, and secures it with Microsoft Identity Platform.
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The Journey to One .NET
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Product Marketing Manager for .NET Beth Massi talks about her journey from FoxPro to .NET 5 and highlights the great topics covered in this CODE Focus issue.
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From .NET Standard to .NET 5
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Microsoft's release of .NET 5 will be a shared code base for .NET Core, Mono, Xamarin, and future .NET implementations. So which target framework names (TFMs) should you use? This article explains when you should target .NET Standard 2.0 or when you should go straight to .NET 5.
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Introducing C# 9.0
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
The C# compiler that ships with the .NET 5 SDK has been updated and streamlined; but C# 9.0 is supported only on .NET 5.0. Read this overview of the best C# 9.0 feaures to support native cloud applications, modern software engineering practices, and more concise readable code.
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EF Core 5: Building on the Foundation
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Julie’s pretty excited about the new features in EF Core 5. You will be too when you read about the bugs fixed, over 200 new features (including many-to-many support and the ability to filter when eager loading with the Include method) and minor enhancements and support for previous versions.
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Project Tye: Creating Microservices in a .NET Way
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Learn to use Project Tye, an experimental developer's tool that makes the experience of creating, testing and deploying microservices easier in .NET. Note that Tye's deployment target is only to Kubernetes.
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Big Data and Machine Learning in .NET 5
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Learn about .NET for Spark and ML.NET to help .NET 5 applications better use big data and machine learning (ML). This article includes a code walkthrough.
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F# 5: A New Era of Functional Programming with .NET
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Microsoft has updated F# 5 with new features that include FSI in .NET Core and support for packages in NuGet. Plus F# 5 now supports Jupyter Notebooks as well as Visual Studio Code Notebooks, and more.
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Xamarin.Forms 5: Dual Screens, Dark Modes, Designing with Shapes, and More
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Learn about new enhancements to Xamarin.Forms 5 to support new screen sizes, orientatonss and postures supported in the Surface Duo.
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.NET 5.0 Runtime Highlights
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Learn about new .NET 5.0 projects: single file apps and ARM64. Single file apps enable you to create standalone, true xcopy, single-file executables. ARM64 projects let you build applications that will run faster on hardware that uses ARM chips (phones, Surface Pro X, the Samsung Galaxy Book S and the Apple Silicon-based Mac line).
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Blazor Updates in .NET 5
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Learn about new features available in Blazor using .NET 5 including the Blazor WebAssembly SDK, new built-in support for virtualization, CSS isolation, lazy loading and built-in features that reduce or eliminate JavaScript interop code required.
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Azure Tools for .NET in Visual Studio 2019
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
Overview of how to use Visual Studio 2019 to consume Azure services from a .NET app and deploy your app to Azure using the revamped Connected Services experience. Get started using Connected Services to add service dependencies to your application.
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Windows Desktop Apps and .NET 5
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0
This article describes the differences between .NET 5 and .NET Core 3.x and describes breaking changes from the upgrade. Overview of how to upgrade existing WinForms and WPF applications to .NET 5.
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.NET Core: The WOW Factor
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
Rod is just as excited as everyone else about all the new tools in .NET Core 3.0.
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Be More Productive in Visual Studio 2019
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
If you thought Visual Studio was a great tool before, you’re going to go nuts about the latest release. Mika and Kendra talk about the changes that they’re most excited about.
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Upgrading Windows Desktop Applications with .NET Core 3
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
It’s not enough that creating apps using .NET Core is better than ever before. Now, Olia shows us how with .NET Core 3, upgrading existing apps is easier, too.
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ML.NET: Machine Learning for .NET Developers
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
Machine Learning doesn’t have to be the big scary monster lurking in the dark. Bri and Cesar show you how Microsoft’s ML.NET lets you design your own models specific to your deployment context and needs even if you’ve never played with ML before.
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A New Era of Productivity with Blazor
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
Blazor is a new Web framework that uses .NET Core’s architecture, essentially combining the simplicity of Razor with .NET Core concepts. Ed shows you how to get the most from this great tool.
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Entity Framework Core 3.0: A Foundation for the Future
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
The latest release of Entity Framework gets it geared up for some big future changes. Julie shows you that the changes are nothing to sneeze at.
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What’s New in ASP.NET Core 3.0
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
Get ready for an exciting list (and examples) as Shawn explores the new tools in ASP.NET Core 3.0.
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Visual Studio for Mac 8.3: It’s Not Just for Xamarin Anymore!
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
If you’ve been putting off using VS on the Mac, you’ll be excited by Ben’s experience with the new release. It’s got all the whistles and bells you know and love and it makes some tasks even easier than you’d expect.
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From Xamarin Native to Xamarin.Forms: Reaping the Rewards without the Risk
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
If you need access to native platforms, you’re going to want to see what Ryan has to say about Xamarin.Forms. He’ll show you that migration isn’t the pain you thought it might be.
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gRPC as a Replacement for WCF
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
You’ve been programming in C# for a while now, and you know that you need bidirectional streaming with low latency and high throughput. Google’s remote procedure call offering (gRPC) has what you need, and Magnus shows you why.
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Essential C# 8.0
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0
When .NET Core got its makeover, so did C#. Mark shows you what’s improved and why you’ll want to work with it right away.