According to the product team, the most notable change in this release is that JetBrains .NET IDE Rider is now officially supported. Previously, Rider could be used with Uno, but it required several setup steps to get started. Now the experience is more similar to what Visual Studio and VS Code developers experience. 

“What this means in practice is that you can enjoy the full set of developer productivity enhancers such as C# and XAML Hot Reload for Uno Platform apps and debugging,” the Uno product team wrote in a blog post. 

This release also features improvements to Hot Reload. There is a new visual indicator to better help developers monitor changes as they are coding, which displays new information whenever Hot Reload is triggered. 

Another update is the addition of two new UI controls: ItemsView and SelectorBar. ItemsView displays a collection of items in a customizable layout. It supports dynamic item arrangements, smooth scrolling, and virtualization. SelectorBar is a UI component that allows users to select from a set of options. 

Uno Platform 5.3 additionally features Open Sans as a new default font option to provide a more consistent look across targets. According to the product team, Segoe UI is the default font on WinUI, but that font isn’t available on macOS or Linux. Open Sans looks similar to Segoe UI and fits well with WinUI’s Fluent theme. 

It also now supports variable fonts, which are fonts that contain multiple files and characteristics, such as weight, width, or italic, rather than a single file. This support was needed because Open Sans is a variable font. Because it can be hard to use multi-file fonts in WinUI, the team is also introducing the ability to use a font manifest to specify where single file fonts and multiple file fonts can be used. 

Other features include simplified versioning, support for SkiaSharp 3 preview, removed support for .NET 7, and support for the .NET 9 preview. 

More information is available in the release blog post.

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The new AI-powered UI editor will allow developers to create applications or make changes to specific UI elements using text prompts. Developers can also feed the AI images or mockups along with their prompts.

“Our goal with OpenSilver 3.0 is to empower developers with tools that enhance their productivity and creativity,” said Giovanni Albani, CEO of Userware. “Creating beautiful, functional user interfaces shouldn’t be a tedious process. With our AI-powered UI designer, developers of all backgrounds can easily create stunning UIs. They can focus on their passion for building and crafting software while leaving the repetitive tasks and technical details to the AI.”

Another update in this release is a new drag-and-drop UI Designer includes over 100 controls that can be used to create .NET apps and websites.

OpenSilver 3.0 also introduces an Online XAML Designer that allows developers to create apps directly within a web browser and then transfer them to Visual Studio for further development.

And finally, this release also adds support for VS Code, enabling developers to utilize Windows, Mac, or Linux to build their apps with. “Developers shouldn’t have to struggle with multiple codebases to reach different platforms,” said Albani. “OpenSilver 3.0 enables them to build for all major platforms. They can target the web, desktop, mobile, and soon even VR headsets, all from a single codebase.”

In addition to these announcements, the team also revealed what’s on the roadmap for future releases: .NET MAUI support, Blazor components, and the ability to add interactive 3D elements to OpenSilver apps. 

“The release of OpenSilver 3.0 marks a significant milestone, but it’s just the beginning. We’ve been dedicated to this project for over a decade and remain committed to continuous innovation,” said Albani. “Our future updates will further enhance the capabilities of our platform, bringing even more advanced features to developers.”

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It includes full support for the OpenAI API, including Assistants v2 and Chat Completions, as well as the latest model, GPT-4o. 

With the release of this library, developers will now be able to build their own libraries on top of it as well. 

The library is currently in beta, and the companies will continue working with the community over the next several months to gather feedback for improving it. 

“This official .NET library ensures a smooth and supported integration with OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. It also complements OpenAI’s official libraries for Python and TypeScript/JavaScript developers,” the .NET team wrote in a blog post. 

In its announcement, Microsoft highlighted that the work of Roger Pincombe was instrumental in getting the library to where it is today. He created the first OpenAI package for .NET back in June 2020 and has been working closely with the Microsoft and OpenAI teams since then. He is also working on creating a migration guide from his library to the new one, according to Microsoft. 

Microsoft will be fielding questions about the new library and sharing more information in its .NET Community Standup on June 19 at 1 PM ET | 10 AM PT. 

Read about other Open-Source Projects of the Week

• Apache Pinot
• Phi-3
• Flow-IPC

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Microsoft and OpenAI’s ongoing partnership has resulted in the creation of an official OpenAI .NET library, which will be available in a few weeks. The library provides parity with .NET and other programming languages, provides a unified experience across OpenAI and Azure OpenAI, and gives access to OpenAI features and models, including GPT-4o and Assistants v2.

Microsoft is also working on a partnership with Weavite to provide .NET vector database options. Additionally, several of its internal teams (Semantic Kernel, Azure SQL, and Azure AI Search) have been working behind-the-scenes to build a seamless developer experience for working with AI. 

RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft Build: Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric, new GitHub Copilot extensions, and more

The company also added new quick-start samples that give developers ideas for working with LLM frameworks, such as Microsoft’s own Semantic Kernel.

Microsoft is also working on several new features across .NET Aspire, Semantic Kernel, and Azure that will help developers monitor their LLM apps, now in preview. For instance, .NET Aspire can be used to collect metrics and traces from Semantic Kernel. 

“Large language model (LLM) applications require reliable, performant, and high-quality outcomes. Developers need to measure and track the results and behaviors of their LLM applications in both development and production environments and identify and resolve any issues,” the .NET team wrote in a blog post. 

On a related note, .NET Aspire, which brings together tools, templates, and NuGet packages to enable the development of distributed apps, is now generally available.

“Whether you’re building a new application, adding cloud-native capabilities to an existing one, or are already deploying .NET apps to production in the cloud today, .NET Aspire can help you get there faster,” the .NET team wrote. 

The company also invested further in cloud-native development. New improvements there include smaller .NET container images, faster app startup times, and new features and libraries in ASP.NET Core for streamlining cloud-native scenarios.

And finally, Microsoft revealed the fourth preview of .NET 9, which is expected later this year. New features include support for generic parameters in “UnsafeProcessorAttribute,” a new server garbage collector mode, feature switches with trimming support, and more. 

A full list of Microsoft’s announcements around .NET at Microsoft Build can be found in Microsoft’s official blog post. 

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There are three components being released: Smart Paste, Smart TextArea, and Smart ComboBox.

Smart Paste fills out forms using whatever is in the user’s clipboard, making it easier to add data from other sources. 

Smart TextArea allows developers to configure autocomplete using a company’s preferred tone, policies, URLs, and more. 

And finally, Smart ComboBox makes suggestions based on semantic matching to make it easier for users to find what they need.

.NET Smart Components are currently an experimental feature available in Blazor, MVC, and Razor Pages with .NET 6 or late. The company plans to add support for .NET MAUI, WPF, and Windows Forms in the future. 

“You don’t have to spend weeks of dev time redesigning your UX or researching machine learning and prompt engineering. .NET Smart Components are prebuilt end-to-end AI features that you can drop into your existing app UIs to make your users more productive,” Daniel Roth, program manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. 

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“With this release, .NET reshapes the way we build intelligent, cloud-native, applications and high-traffic services that scale on demand,” Gaurav Seth, partner director of product for developer platforms at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “Whether you’re deploying to Linux or Windows, using containers or a cloud app model of your choice, .NET 8 makes building these apps easier. It includes a set of proven libraries that are used today by the many high-scale services at Microsoft to help you with fundamental challenges around observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and more.”

In .NET 8, developers can integrate large language models, like GPT, into a .NET app. To improve compatibility with generative AI workloads, the company also added several enhancements in the System.Numerics library. 

Microsoft has spent the past several months working with internal and external partners to give developers access to AI models, services, and platforms, including Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Search, Milvus, Qdrant, and Microsoft Teams. The Semantic Kernel SDK helps simplify the integration process for working with those services. 

To make it easier for developers to get started with AI, the company also created several samples and reference templates that showcase AI patterns and practices. Currently these include Customer Chatbot, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and Developing Apps using Azure AI services. 

The next main part of this release is the preview of .NET Aspire, which is a tech stack designer for building cloud-native applications. It comes with components that include features like telemetry, resilience, configuration, and health checks.

There were also several updates made to benefit developers using containers. Microsoft is providing experimental variants of container images that provide minimal application sides. There are also new Chiseled Ubuntu image variants, which further reduce attack surfaces. 

Blazor, a framework for building interactive UIs, has also been updated with several new features, including the ability to use Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly in the same app, implementation of the “Jiterpreter” based runtime, and support for generating Identity UIs. 

The cross-platform development framework .NET MAUI was updated as well with new controls, UI elements and platform-specific behaviors, like desktop interaction getting better click handling and keyboard listeners. 

And finally, several C# improvements from C# 12 have made their way into .NET 8. These include the ability to create primary constructors in any class with a simple syntax, new default values for parameters in lambda expressions, and the ability to use the “using” alias to alias any type, not just named ones. 

In addition to .NET 8, Microsoft also announced that Visual Studio 2022 17.8 is now available, with new features that improve productivity, support for different programming languages, and enterprise management.

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The Uno Platform is a platform for building multi-platform .NET apps from a single codebase. 

In the 5.0 release, support for C# Markup has been added. According to the project maintainers, C# Markup was desired by programmers because it allows them to build a full application from just that language. “A massive bit of feedback from the community has been the need to learn multiple languages to build an Uno Platform application,” the Uno Platform Team explained in a blog post. 

C# Markup supports standard WinUI, Uno.Toolkit, and Uno.Extensions controls, or developers can use the C# Markup support generator to use any third-party control. It also comes packaged with capabilities like data binding, styles, resources, templates, and visual states. 

Another benefit is that the language allows app UIs to be created declaratively and have a clear separation between the UI and the underlying business logic. 

The Uno Platform Team also released a Figma to C# Markup plugin, which is inspired by the Figma-to-XAML plugin. 

Several updates were made to the MVUX extension, which implements the Model-View-Update design pattern. It now takes better advantage of Hot Reload, which is a capability that allows developers to update code and run it without needing to pause and rebuild the app. Now, Model and View can be altered without the applications needing to be restarted. 

The team also created a course for learning about Hot Reload. The hands-on workshop guides developers through building a simple calculator that takes advantage of this feature. It also created another workshop that teaches how to build an app for streaming YouTube videos that can be deployed across multiple platforms, which also highlights the benefits of MVUX. 

Other improvements in Uno Platform 5.0 include MP4 camera capture for iOS, improved composition support for Skia targets, improved DPI scaling and theming support for GTK, and more.

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“Our .NET MAUI updates continue to meet developers’ demands for the best controls with which to build cross-platform mobile and desktop apps,” said Syncfusion CEO Daniel Jebaraj. “Volume 3 delivers more responsive, interactive UI components that exemplify the high performance and extensibility MAUI is built on. This release also adds major updates to every platform, with a special focus on the Blazor platform.”

.NET MAUI

The 2023 Volume 3 release introduces the following .NET MAUI controls:

• Button
• Check Box
• Date Picker
• Date Time Picker
• Picker
• Radio Button
• Segmented Control
• Time Picker
• Tree View

In addition to these new controls, the Accordion, Chips, Expander, Numeric Entry, and PDF Viewer controls for .NET MAUI are promoted to production-ready status. The MAUI PDF Viewer also boasts a new set of powerful annotation tools.

WinUI

The WinUI collection receives a new Shimmer control that indicates to users when content is loading or processing in the background, improving an app’s responsiveness. The Ribbon control for WinUI also receives improvements to enhance the user experience further. It supports a new quick-access toolbar for rendering commonly used actions outside the Ribbon and screen tips that provide information about each Ribbon item when it’s hovered over.

Blazor and Web

The Charts control for all JavaScript-based platforms now boasts a cylindrical chart type to provide a unique aesthetic to viewers. In addition, on-demand loading is now supported in the Scheduler and Gantt Chart components, allowing developers to better handle scenarios with limited resources. Blazor developers can enjoy many enhancements for major controls like the DataGrid, PDF Viewer, Image Editor, and Scheduler.

For more on the new controls and enhancements, see the What’s New page or read the announcement blog post. Current users can download the 2023 Volume 3 release from the Announcements forum.

About Syncfusion, Inc.
Syncfusion is the enterprise technology partner of choice for software development and business intelligence, delivering an ecosystem of compatible developer control suites, embeddable BI platforms, and business software. Headquartered in Research Triangle Park, N.C., Syncfusion has established itself as a trusted partner worldwide for use in mission-critical applications through its service-oriented approach. Syncfusion’s Essential Studio suite has expanded from one data grid at its launch in 2001, to over 1,800 controls for web, mobile, and desktop development. After nearly two decades of helping developers build business software with Essential Studio, the company channeled this expertise into its own line of enterprise products: Bold BI and Bold Reports for embedded business intelligence, data analysis, and visualization; BoldSign, an embeddable e-signing solution; and most recently, BoldDesk, a customer support platform. Today, Syncfusion has more than 29,000 customers, including large financial institutions, Fortune 100 companies, and global IT consultancies, relying on Essential Studio and Bold products for their business success.

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“Today, we’re excited to announce the first preview of the .NET MAUI extension, which, paired with C# Dev Kit, gives you the tools you need to develop your cross-platform .NET mobile and desktop apps with VS Code on Windows, macOS, and Linux,” Maddy Montaquila, senior program manager for .NET MAUI at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. 

Other updates in this .NET 8 preview include a new WASM mode, updates to several source generators, NativeAOT support on iOS and performance improvements. 

The new WASM mode is a Hybrid globalization mode, which provides a lighter ICU bundle and leverages the Web API. It is ideal for applications that use localization data from multiple sources. 

Several improvements were made to the System.Text.Json source generator, including caching support, better formatting of generated code, and new diagnostic warnings. Improvements were also made to the configuration binding source generator.

Microsoft also introduced a new options validation source generator that implements validation logic and reduces startup overhead, and another new source generator for interoperability with COM interfaces. 

There were also several updates to ASP.NET Core that are available in this release. The debugging experience has been improved, there are new metrics, complex form binding is now supported in minimal APIs. 

Updates to Blazor include form model binding and validation with server-side rendering, improved page navigation, streaming rendering for preserve existing DOM elements, and more. 

“.NET 8 Preview 6 contains exciting new features and improvements that would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of a diverse team of engineers at Microsoft and a passionate open-source community. We want to extend our sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed to .NET 8 so far, whether it was through code contributions, bug reports, or providing feedback,” Justin Yoo, senior cloud advocate for .NET at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

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“We believe .NET developers should be able to get their apps to the cloud quickly, scale their apps without compromising performance, and evolve their apps based on actionable data and feedback about your apps in production. We’ll invest in making it easier to manage the full end-to-end experience from local development and testing through continuous integration and deployment. Our goal is to make it easier to implement microservice architectures and build and deploy containers,” Jeremy Likness, principal program manager for .NET Web Frameworks, wrote in a blog post. 

To support cloud-native developers, Microsoft is working on ways to make it easier to manage the end-to-end experience of development, from local development all the way through testing and deployment. 

Microsoft says that it also has a goal to make it easier to implement microservices architectures and deploy containers. 

This preview includes improvements for container imagers, such as adding Debian 12 as the default distribution for container images, allowing containers to be run by non-root users, and tagging container images with the 8.0-preview tag.

There are a number of Linux improvements too, including the ability to build .NET from the dotnet/dotnet repository, new Ubuntu Chiseled images, and updates to the minimum baseline targets.

Other features in .NET 8 Preview 1 include:

• NativeAOT updates
• Utility methods have been added to “System.Random” and “System.Security.Cryptography.RandomNumberGenerator”
• Improvements to “System.Text.Json”
• New types in the core libraries that are focused on performance
• “dotnet publish” and “dotnet pack” will now by default create Release assets

“.NET 8 Preview 1 is a testament to the power of collaboration between a diverse team of engineers at Microsoft and a highly engaged open source community. The new features and improvements in .NET 8 are a direct result of the hard work and dedication of this community, and we are incredibly grateful for everyone’s contributions,” Likness concluded.

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