For this year's Dotnet Conf Microsoft compiled an action packed agenda. In total it had about twice the amount of talks as compared to last year. The talks covered a variety of topics ranging from libraries to new frameworks to AI to Azure services. Of course, the standard Blazor hype train was at the station, too!
Personally, I've enjoyed the AI talks the most. I don't know, but how Microsoft packages AI into Azure Services thrills me every time. They also think about any kind of import / export. I wish I could do a bit more in that sector, but I'm afraid all the NLP stuff with LUIS et al. will remain my touchpoints for quite some time.
The big news was not much of a news, but rather a session of talks about the earlier announcement of .NET Core 3. This is a big one. Many performance enhancements, simplifications, and outstanding possibilities in this one. Furthermore, we get a new love for apps, with Microsoft's (3rd?) attempt on centralizing app distribution. This time its called AppCenter, however, what makes it different this time is the target audience. The AppCenter is not targeted for end users (yet), but rather developers. Developer who can easily deploy, analyze, monitor, and test their (native) applications. All in all its an attempt of bringing web possibilities (e.g., in terms of deployment and testing) to client applications.
With ASP.NET Core 3 out there people already start seeing significant improvements in multiple areas. One of the most interesting ones is development safety. As of now the .NET team has been very busy to annotate everything in the standard framework with nullability in mind. So we - as developers - can now know if null checks matter (or should be included) or not. This is just wonderful. Another area of improvement was the native communication capabilities. Using the new streams / pipes its much easier (and faster) to make RPC calls or anything that talks to native code. Essentially, the whole hardware level has been moved a bit closer to the CLR. Hence many the performance optimizations.
For me Dotnet Conf 2019 was a great event with a superb lineup and swift organization. Thanks to everyone who was involved!