I messaged a developer friend to see if he liked my puns, and he said “false.” I told him I didn’t appreciate the cyber boolean.

On tap this week:

• .NET 5 RC 2 ships
• .NET Foundation updates
• Last week in the .NET world

🚢 .NET 5 RC 2 shipsPermalink

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the release of .NET 5.0 RC 2. With the general release of .NET 5 on November 10, it’s the last release candidate (“near-final,” as Richard Lander puts it). You can download it here (and will also need the latest Visual Studio preview on Windows or Mac).

The biggest news out of the general announcement post? MSI installers are now available for ARM64 (yes!)—however, note the .NET 5 SDK does not contain the Windows Desktop components on ARM64. As a bonus, I learned that ClickOnce is still a thing and available for .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5 Windows apps.

ASP.NET Core updates for BlazorPermalink

For being so late in the release cycle, ASP.NET Core was able to ship quite a few Blazor updates for RC 2.

As I’ve written about extensively, Blazor now ships with CSS isolation—the ability to scope styles to only a single component. Previously, when the feature was released in .NET 5 Preview 8, all scoped files were bundled into a big scoped.styles.css file. If you were styling a lot of components, the bundle could get quite heavy. Now, Blazor produces one bundle for each referenced project or package with the format MyProject.styles.css. (The official Microsoft doc on CSS isolation, which I’m writing, should be live in the next week or two.)

In addition, RC 2 comes with a bunch of Blazor tooling updates. The pesky static port issue was resolved, you can step out and over async methods, and can debug lazy loaded assemblies. Also, your tools can now throw warnings when using unsupported Blazor Web Assembly APIs from a browser. (This is part of a larger .NET 5 effort that annotates which APIs are supported with a platform compatability analyzer.)

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