Microsoft is planning its next release in the open

Much has been written about .NET 5 — the final step in Microsoft’s quest to rebuild .NET as a cross-platform, open-source project. But .NET 5 was also the _first _stepin something else — Microsoft’s new release cadence. For the foreseeable future, Microsoft promises us a new version of .NET every November, every year.

The most significant goals for .NET 6 are already set. Many of them target improvements that didn’t make it into .NET 5, like a next-generation Xamarin that lowers the barriers between desktop and native mobile development, and better integration between the many different Windows UI toolkits. And there are a host of smaller-scale enhancements, which are laid out point-by-point in Microsoft’s official roadmap.

But if you want to really understand the future of a platform, you need to know its big-picture plans and vision. And now Microsoft has a new hidden gem of a website that explores the vision question, called themesof.net. First made public late last year, themesof.net collects GitHub issues and aggregates them into themes and epics (terminology that stems from Agile project management). As .NET project manager Immo Landwerth explains, it’s not just a place to see planning, but also ideas being challenged, changed, and revised in real-time.

In other words, it’s a great place for a .NET enthusiast to browse away a half hour.

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