David Gardiner

Dec 28, 2021
Summer holiday reading

It’s Summer holidays, Christmas was a few days ago, there’s sunny, warm weather on the forecast. Perfect days for lazing around home and reading a good book or two.

I happen to be passing Blackwood Books recently (we were actually visiting an adjacent shop but I thought I’d have a quick look). I asked to see their ‘local history’ section and was taken along some winding corridors to a couple of bookcases full of books. I didn’t have that long to browse, but two books looked interesting.

Not Only in Stone

(Affiliate link)

Not Only In Stone by Phyliss Somerville was first published way back in 1942. It tells the story of Mary (Polly) Thomas and her family, who emigrated to South Australia from Cornwall, England in 1865. It caught my attention as parts of the story are based in Wallaroo, Moonta and Kadina - towns on the Yorke Peninsula that I have some family connections of my own. It is a fascinating snapshot of early colonial life.

I’m two thirds through the book as I write this. So far Polly has endured numerous hardships, but is not deterred in providing for and making a home for her family. I’ll be interested to see how it ends.

A Sacred Trust: The Uniting Churches in the Mitcham Hills

At first glance a possibly unusual pick. I grew up in the Mitcham Hills area, and have been involved in the Methodist and then Uniting Church my entire life. This book, written by Rosemary Mitchell and published back in 2000, traces the history of the many Uniting Churches that were and continue to be in the Mitcham Hills area. I have a vague recollection of being aware of the book, possibly around the time it was launched, but I didn’t have a copy and a few people I’ve talked to since also had either forgotten or didn’t know about it.

The old history is fascinating, and just the effort (especially in the early days) that people put into ensuring that they had worship services was inspiring. Take this quote from page 6 (discussing the travelling preachers did in the 1850s)

Later Mr Illman who lived at Unley would walk to Cherry Gardens in the morning, walk on to Clarendon for the evening service and walk back to Unley

That’s a decent drive in a car today, let alone walking on foot. Google Maps suggests that’s around 50kms! Possibly in the 1850s you might have been able to take a more direct shortcut across the hills from Cherry Gardens to Clarendon, but that’s still astounding.

In the latter sections, there are lots of familiar names. Families and people I knew when I was growing up (and some I’m still connected to). Fun fact, I’m actually mentioned in the book too! (via my volunteering with the Blackwood Youth Project back in the 1990s). That was a pleasant surprise.

There’s a few passing mentions of indigenous people living in the area in the early days. It would be interesting to find out more about that - might need to see if there’s any other books that cover Aboriginal history of the area in more detail.

I don’t know if the book is still available anywhere. I’ll make some enquiries to see if it’s still for sale, otherwise I might have to lend my copy out to friends and family that found it interesting.
Nov 4, 2021
What's new in .NET 6

I’m compiling information for our next Adelaide .NET User Group meetup which is focusing on the launch of .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022.

.NET 6 is the final area in this series. It encompasses changes to both the runtime and base class libraries. There is a lot going on here, so do let me know if I’ve missed something.

Preview 1

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/5853

ARM64
- On Windows, we’re adding support for Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Framework (WPF)
Theme
- Improve startup and throughput using runtime execution information (PGO)
.NET CLI
- Response files are now supported
- Directives
Libraries
- New math APIs
- Improved support for Windows ACLs
- Portable thread pool
Runtime
- Support for Apple Silicon (M1 Arm64), .NET Rosetta 2 Emulation
- Improving single file apps
- Single-file signing on macOS
- Crossgen2
- Dynamic PGO
- Arm64 performance
- Hardware-accelerating structs
Preview 2

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/5889

Theme
- Improve .NET Inner Loop Performance
- .NET has a great client app development experience
.NET Libraries
- System.Text.Json – ReferenceHandler.IgnoreCycles
- PriorityQueue
- Better parsing of standard numeric formats
- SignalR – Nullable annotations
Runtime
- Framework Assemblies are compiled with Crossgen2
- Profile guided optimization
- JIT improvements
Preview 3

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/5890

Libraries
- Faster handling of structs as Dictionary values
- Faster interface checking and casting
Runtime
- Codegen
Tools
- Initial .NET Hot Reload support now available for web apps
Preview 4

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6098

Tools
- Hot Reload with the Visual Studio debugger and dotnet CLI
Libraries
- System.Text.Json support for IAsyncEnumerable
- System.Text.Json Writeable DOM Feature
- Microsoft.Extensions.Logging compile-time source generator
- System.Linq enhancements
- Significantly improved FileStream performance on Windows
- Enhanced Date, Time and Time Zone support
Runtime
- CodeGen
.NET Diagnostics
- EventPipe for Mono and Improved EventPipe Performance
- IL trimming
- Single-file publishing
CLI install of .NET 6 SDK Optional Workloads

Preview 5

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6099

.NET SDK
- Optional Workload improvements
- NuGet Package Validation
- more Roslyn Analyzers
- Enable custom guards for Platform Compatibility Analyzer
Windows Forms

More detail in separate post
- default font
- More runtime designers
Libraries
- Dropping support for older frameworks
- Microsoft.Extensions
- JsonSerializer Source generation
- WebSocket Compression
- Socks proxy support
- Support for OpenTelemetry Metrics
- Vector<T> now supports nint and nuint
- Support for OpenSSL 3
- Add support ChaCha20/Poly1305 cryptography algorithm
Interop
- Objective-C interoperability support
Diagnostics
- (EventPipe/DiagnosticsServer) – MonoVM
Runtime
- CodeGen
Preview 6

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6325

x64 emulation update

Tools
- .NET SDK Optional Workload improvements
- Crossgen2 replaces crossgen
Libraries
- TLS support for System.DirectoryServices.Protocols
- Improved sync-over-async performance
Runtime
- W^X memory policy
- CodeGen
Preview 7

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6444

.NET SDK
- C# project templates modernized
Libraries
- Reflection APIs for nullability information
- ZipFile Respects Unix File Permissions
- NativeMemory APIs
- System.Text.Json serialization notifications
- System.Text.Json serialization property ordering
- “write raw” JSON with System.Text.Json.Utf8JsonWriter
- Synchronous stream overloads on JsonSerializer
- System.Text.Json.Nodes.JsonNode support for dynamic is removed
- System.Diagnostics Propagators
- Simplified call patterns for cryptographic operations
- Full Case Mapping Support in Globalization Invariant Mode
Runtime
- W^X (write xor execute) support for all platforms and architectures
- CodeGen
Early .NET 7 Feature Preview
- Generic Math
Release Candidate 1

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6569
- Source build
- Profile-guided optimization (PGO)
- Dynamic PGO
- Crossgen2
- Security mitigations
- HTTP/3
- SDK workloads
Release Candidate 2

More details in https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/6570
- C# 10
- .NET SDK: C# project templates modernized
- macOS and Windows Arm64 Update
Focussed posts

In addition the following posts were made:
Nov 3, 2021
What's new in MAUI
I’m compiling information for our next Adelaide .NET User Group meetup which is focusing on the launch of .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022.

.NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) was originally announced way back in May 2020 at BUILD 2020, and then updated in a blog post in February 2021. .NET MAUI is an evolution of the increasingly popular Xamarin.Forms toolkit.

We had to wait for preview 3 before more information about MAUI was forthcoming.

Preview 3
- Windows Desktop Now Supported
- Updates to Controls and Layouts
- Semantic Properties for Accessibility
Preview 4
- BlazorWebView
- Splash Screen
- Raw Assets
- Visual Studio Productivity
- Ecosystem Readiness
Preview 5
- Animations
- UI Components
- Single Project Templates Updates
Preview 6
- Workload Installation
- Gestures
- Clipping
- Native Alerts
- Single Project and Windows
Preview 7
- New Layouts
- Accessibility Changes and Improvements
- Font Scaling
Around this time a blog post was also published highlighting previews of the Community Toolkits.

Preview 8

Coinciding with the .NET 6 Release Candidate 1 releases. This is when the announcement was made that MAUI would not be shipping in November as originally planned. MAUI will stay in preview until into 2022.

Preview 9

Coinciding with .NET 6 Release Candidate 2
- Updated Controls
- Borders, Corners, and Shadows – Oh my!
- Quick Android Startup
- Ecosystem Controls (DevExpress, Syncfusion, Telerik)

ARM64

Theme

.NET CLI

Libraries

Runtime

Theme

.NET Libraries

Runtime

Libraries

Runtime

Tools

Tools

Libraries

Runtime

.NET Diagnostics

.NET SDK

Windows Forms

Libraries

Interop

Diagnostics

Runtime

Tools

Libraries

Runtime

.NET SDK

Libraries

Runtime

Early .NET 7 Feature Preview

Focussed posts