Wednesday, January 28, 2026

David Ortinau, Gerald Versluis, Tim Miller, and Javier Suarez walk us through community updates, the origin story of Avalonia, Control Gallery, AlohaKit and several MAUI demos.

The Windows Package Manager team ships 1.12.460 with App Installer moving to WinUI 3, manifest v1.12, and first class font support including a winget-font source plus install and uninstall. This post shows how the update smooths dev box setup and scripting with fixes for portable PATH upgrades and several reliability issues.

Announcing the v8.0.123 release tag for .NET 8.0.23, with guidance on cloning the tag to build .NET from source or using the attached source archives. This post emphasizes PGP-signed tarballs and zipballs with a public key for verification, a practical boost for supply chain hygiene.

Andrew Lock recaps new capabilities in NetEscapades.EnumGenerators 1.0.0-beta19 and why generated enum helpers can be dramatically faster than the built-in Enum APIs. This post introduces EnumParseOptions to turn off number parsing and control comparison behavior, plus SerializationOptions to emit lower or upper invariant names without extra allocations. It also adds ReadOnlySpan<char> APIs via System.Memory so span-based parsing works on netstandard2.0 and .NET Framework targets.

Ian Griffiths unpacks C# 14’s implicit span conversions in .NET 10 and how they make Span and ReadOnlySpan feel first class. You will see why arrays and strings now flow cleanly into span-based APIs, enabling simpler signatures, better type inference, and extension methods that finally behave the way you expect. He also highlights gotchas with older libraries and offers practical design tips to avoid overload ambiguities.

Sudhir Mangla maps the shift from the legacy Application Insights SDK to OpenTelemetry and shows how to get real end-to-end observability for .NET on Azure. This post focuses on why the change matters and gives a practical path with the Azure Monitor OTel distro, the Collector, solid log-trace correlation, and KQL-driven troubleshooting that keeps costs in check.

Ravikumar Makwana explains the real difference between Factory and Strategy in C#, showing how confusing the two leads to brittle code and hidden bugs. Using payment and notification examples, he frames Factory as the choice for what to create and Strategy as the choice for how behavior varies at runtime, then composes them for a clean, testable design. If your code mixes creation and behavior checks, this post offers practical guidelines and sample implementations to simplify things without over-engineering.

A round-up of 10 real-world bugs PVS-Studio caught in 2025 C# projects, surfacing sneaky issues like null coalescing precedence, slippery pattern matching, and LINQ deferred execution with captured variables. This post shows why Equals and GetHashCode drift, why anonymous unsubscription does nothing, and how bit flags can make switch cases unreachable.

Ravikumar Makwana shows how C# records, as data-first types, tame state bugs through value-based equality, immutability, and the with expression for safe updates. This post highlights where records shine in everyday code like DTOs and value objects, while keeping classes for behavior and identity. It closes with a simple rule of thumb to decide between records and classes.

Microsoft ships Windows App SDK 1.8.4, a stability-focused update that trims the Windows ML DLL and adds playful new TextRewriter tones like Rewrite as Shakespeare and Rewrite in Sci‑fi. The release smooths out real world pain points for WinUI 3 apps, fixing Class not registered errors in self-contained deployments and improving StoragePickers, PublishSingleFile, and incremental builds. If you build Windows desktop apps in C#, this post shows what just got easier and why it matters.

Rick and Oscar chat with Anjuli Jhakry, a .NET MAUI developer and MVP building a startup app for people with food intolerances. She shares lessons from moving from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI, why .NET 8 feels production ready, and how she uses ML.NET to learn from user feedback to deliver personalized recommendations. This podcast also hits on keeping architectures simple and how mentorship and community can accelerate developer growth.

Join Daniel Roth, Mike Kistler, and Reuben Bond discuss the future of Orleans in the ASP.NET Community Standup.