.NET Core 3.1 Preview 2 Polishes Blazor/Desktop Functionality, Supports C++/CLI ('Managed C++') -- Visual Studio Magazine

.NET Core 3.1 Preview 2 Polishes Blazor/Desktop Functionality, Supports C++/CLI ('Managed C++')

By David Ramel
11/04/2019

As .NET Core 3.1 will be a "small and short release focused on key improvements in Blazor and Windows desktop," the main new functionality introduced in today's Preview 2 is the suport of C++/CLI, also known as "managed C++."

Just like Preview 1 announced about three weeks ago, the new preview shipping today (Nov. 4) focuses on the two main features highlighting the big Sept. 23 milestone release of .NET Core 3.0: Blazor (for C# Web development instead of JavaScript) and desktop development (Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation).

As the dev team is focused on polishing up those features, program manager Richard Lander said the big new thing in Preview 2 is support for C++/CLI, also known as managed C++. "The changes for C++/CLI are primarily in Visual Studio," he said . "You need to install the 'Desktop development with C++' workload and the 'C++/CLI support' component in order to use C++/CLI."

Available as far back as Visual Studio 2005, C++/CLI is described by Wikipedia as: "(C++ modified for Common Language Infrastructure) is a language specification created by Microsoft which supersedes Managed Extensions for C++. It is a complete revision that simplifies the now-deprecated Managed C++ syntax and provides interoperatability with Microsoft .NET languages such as C#."

Microsoft reaffirmed its support of C++/CLI when .NET Core 3.0 was released, stating: "We would like to let everyone know that we are committed to supporting C++/CLI for .NET Core to enable easy interop between C++ codebases and .NET technologies such as WPF and Windows Forms." The company also noted it will have full IDE support for projects targeting .NET Core 3.1 or higher, such as IntelliSense and mixed-mode debugging (IJW) on Windows (no support for macOS or Linux is planned).

With the support for C++/CLI, .NET Core 3.1 Preview 2 introduces two new templates: CLR Class Library (.NET Core) and CLR Empty Project (.NET Core). The new preview was announced at Microsoft's Ignite conference, along with many other dev tool offerings, such as updates of ASP.NET Core and EF Core, Visual Studio 16.4 Preview 3 and Visual Studio for Mac 8.4 Preview 3.

.NET Core 3.1 will be a long term support (LTS) release, supported for at least three years, and is expected to ship next month. Today's Visual Studio 16.4 Preview 3 is a required update to use .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1 on Windows (or Mac 8.4 Preview 3), but it includes .NET Core 3.1, so just updating Visual Studio provides both releases, Lander said.

For more coverage of what's new in Blazor and ASP.NET Core, go here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.