Microsoft is Bringing Visual Studio To the Browser, Unveils .NET 5

Krystalo writes: At its developer conference Build today, Microsoft previewed new Visual Studio features for remote work, the.NET roadmap, and launched ML.NET 1.0. In April, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. Two notable features were Visual Studio Live Share, a real-time collaboration tool included with Visual Studio 2019, and Visual Studio IntelliCode, an extension offering AI-assisted code completion. At Build 2019, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode's capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in Visual Studio Code. And IntelliCode is now included by default in Visual Studio 2019, starting in version 16.1 Preview 2. The company also previewed an algorithm that can locally track your edits -- repeated edit detection -- and suggest other places where you need that same change. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft is experimenting with features that let developers work from anywhere, on any device. The company today announced a private preview for three such new capabilities: Remote-powered developer tools, cloud-hosted developer environments, and a browser-based web companion tool. If the future of work is remote, Microsoft wants to be ready.

Microsoft also announced that it is skipping.NET 4 to avoid confusion with the.NET Framework, which has been on version 4 for years. Going forward, developers will be able to use.NET to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, WebAssembly, and more..NET Core 3 will be succeeded by.NET 5, featuring new.NET APIs, runtime capabilities, and language features. Calling it.NET 5 makes it the highest version Microsoft has ever shipped and indicates that the company hopes it is the future for the.NET platform..NET Core 3 closes much of the remaining capability gap with.NET Framework 4.8, enabling Windows Forms, WPF, and Entity Framework 6..NET 5 will build on this work, Microsoft says, combining.NET Core,.NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono (the original cross-platform implementation of.NET) into a single platform..NET 5 will provide both Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation models. JIT has better performance for desktop/server workloads and development environments. AOT has a faster startup and a small footprint, which is required for mobile and IoT devices..NET 5 will offer one unified toolchain supported by new SDK project types and a flexible deployment model (side-by-side and self-contained EXEs).

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