Sourabh

.NET 5 Preview 7 is now available and is ready for evaluation. Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5
• Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly
• Blazor accessibility improvements
• Blazor performance improvements
• Certificate authentication performance improvements
• Sending HTTP/2 PING frames
• Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport
• Custom header decoding in Kestrel
• Other minor improvements

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 Preview 7 install the .NET 5 SDK.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.7 Preview 5 or newer to use .NET 5 Preview 7. .NET 5 is also supported with the latest preview of Visual Studio for Mac. To use .NET 5 with Visual Studio Code, install the latest version of the C# extension.

Upgrade an existing project

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core app from .NET 5 Preview 6 to .NET 5 Preview 7:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update all Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update System.Net.Http.Json package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.

See the full list of breaking changes in ASP.NET Core for .NET 5.

Upgrade existing Blazor WebAssembly projects

To upgrade an existing Blazor WebAssembly project, update the following properties:

From

<TargetFramework>netstandard2.1</TargetFramework>

<RazorLangVersoin>3.0</RazorLangVersion>

To

<TargetFramework>net5.0</TargetFramework>

<RuntimeIdentifier>browser-wasm</RuntimeIdentifier>

<UseBlazorWebAssembly>true</UseBlazorWebAssembly>

Also, remove any package references to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build, as it is no longer needed.

What’s new?

Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5

Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 apps have access only to the .NET Standard 2.1 API set. With this release, Blazor WebAssembly projects now target .NET 5 (net5.0) and have access to a much wider set of APIs. Implementing Blazor WebAssembly support for the APIs in .NET 5 is a work in progress, so some APIs may throw a PlatformNotSupportedException at runtime. We’d love to hear from you if you’re blocked by the lack of support for specific APIs.

Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly

To enable debugging of Blazor WebAssembly apps in Visual Studio Code, you previously needed to install the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension. This is no longer required as the JavaScript debugger extension is now shipped as part of VS Code. If you’ve previously installed the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension you can now uninstall it. Enabling the preview version of the JavaScript debugger through the Visual Studio Code settings is still required.

Blazor accessibility improvements

The built-in Blazor input components that derive from InputBase now render aria-invalid automatically when the validation fails.

Blazor performance improvements

One of the major areas of investment for Blazor WebAssembly in .NET 5 is improving runtime performance. This is a multifaceted effort. Below are some of the high-level areas being optimized:

• .NET runtime execution
• JSON serialization
• JavaScript interop
• Blazor component rendering

Improving Blazor WebAssembly runtime performance for .NET 5 in an ongoing effort. This release contains some initial performance improvements, and we expect to share more details on the results of this performance work for future .NET 5 updates.

Certificate authentication performance improvements

We have added caching to certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core. Caching certificate validation significantly improves the performance of certificate authentication. Our benchmarks show a 400% improvement in requests per second once caching was enabled.

You don’t need to make any changes to your app to take advantage of performance improvements; caching is on by default. There are options to tune or disable caching if you wish.

Find out more about certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core in the docs.

Sending HTTP/2 PING frames

HTTP/2 has a mechanism for sending PING frames as a way of ensuring whether an idle connection is still functional. This is especially useful to have when working with long-lived streams that are often idle but only intermittently see activity (for example, gRPC streams). We have added the ability to send periodic PING frames in Kestrel by setting limits on KestrelServerOptions.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingInterval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10); options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingTimeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport

Building upon new API introduced in System.Net.Sockets, the sockets transport (default) in Kestrel now allows you to bind to both existing file handles and unix domain sockets. Support for binding to existing file handles enables using the existing Systemd integration without requiring you to use the libuv transport.

Custom header decoding in Kestrel

We added the ability to specify which System.Text.Encoding to use to interpret incoming headers based on the header name instead of defaulting to UTF-8. You can set the RequestHeaderEncodingSelector property on KestrelServerOptions to specify which encoding to use.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.RequestHeaderEncodingSelector = encoding => { switch (encoding) { case "Host": return System.Text.Encoding.Latin1; default: return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8; } }; }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Other improvements

• For preview 7, we’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend on annotating most of the common public API surface of the framework during the 5.0 release.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on Razor Page model.
• Parameters and properties bound from the body are considered required by default.
• We’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend to annotate most of the common public API surface of the framework during the .NET 5 release.
• Authorization when using endpoint routing now receives the HttpContext rather than the endpoint instance. This allows the authorization middleware to access the RouteData and other properties of the HttpContext that were not accessible though the Endpoint class. The endpoint can be fetched from the context using context.GetEndpoint().
• The default format for System.Diagnostics.Activity now defaults to the W3C format. This makes distributed tracing support in ASP.NET Core interoperable with more frameworks by default.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on a Razor Page model.

• FromBodyAttribute now supports configuring an option that allows these parameters or properties to be considered optional:

  C# public IActionResult Post([FromBody(EmptyBodyBehavior = EmptyBodyBehavior.Allow)] MyModel model) { ... }

Give feedback

We hope you enjoy this release of ASP.NET Core in .NET 5! We are eager to hear about your experiences with this latest .NET 5 release. Let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.

Thanks for trying out ASP.NET Core!

Jenova Chen is one of the original indie game development stalwarts, having co-founded Journey developer thatgamecompany with Kellee Santiago in 2006.

Chen and his studio have been proponents of making games that bring about more subtle emotions than fear or excitement. On the latest episode of the GDC Podcast, he explained why he’s drawn to designing games like Flower, Journey, and the studio’s latest game Sky: Children of the Light.

Listen now on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify

“My goal has changed over time even though the mission is the same,” Chen said. “The mission of the company is to help promote video games and let the people around the world that the game industry and games as a media is not all negative like people think. It could be positive, have a good influence on peoples’ lives and it could be considered as a form of art.”

Chen said at first with games like Flower, thatgamecompany simply wanted to make games that were counter to the game industry status quo. And Journey was a response to games that centered on killing, instead focusing on emotions and working together.

“We wanted to make you feel small, we wanted to make you feel in awe, not knowing all the answers,” he said.

But Chen said that even though Journey gained an audience, attention in the art world, and critical acclaim, that one effort wasn’t enough to tilt the scales in favor of more evocative games across the game industry.

“After Flower and Journey, just proving a game can touch people does not change the industry,” he said. “It doesn’t even change society’s view on games as much…nobody cared.”

“For a while I was very disappointed,” Chen said. “I thought that if games could be accepted by the mainstream as art, then people would respect the industry, but they didn’t.”

He said at one point he spoke with his mentor, long-time game industry figure-turned-investor Bing Gordon, and asked him when society might treat games the same way as cinema and literature; as a form of art.

“Bing just said, ‘don’t worry, these people are all going to die, the people who didn’t grow up with games will die very soon,'” Chen recounted, “‘and the ones who grew up with games will already automatically consider them as an artform.'”

“And I said, ‘well in how many years?'” (laughs) But Chen said as years have moved on, he’s realized it’s not about just sitting around and waiting for older people to be replaced by younger people. “We actually have to push for the content itself [so] people who are older will still think games are relevant,” he said.

GDC Podcast music by Mike Meehan

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent Informa Tech

Today, Nintendo hosted the first of what appears to be a new, regular format for the company going forward, the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partners Showcase.

At eight minutes long, today’s show gave us a very quick look at just a small handful of games, providing release dates and content updates for titles on Switch, as well as several more announcements in the Japanese-specific video. The reaction, however, has been mixed to say the least.

Now, it’s worth noting that Nintendo came out with a warning right from the off, saying that the Direct would be “focused on titles from our development and publishing partners” – so no Mario, Smash Bros., etc. In its announcement posts for the show, Nintendo said, “We’ll share a few updates on a small group of previously-announced Nintendo Switch games”, clearly attempting to dampen the levels of hype such an announcement would usually spark.

Still, though, a quick search for ‘Nintendo Direct’ on social media brings up plenty of comments from those who have been left feeling angry after wanting and expecting more. For every angry comment, you’ll find another from those who are in disbelief that any anger can even exist following Nintendo’s hype-killing comments, and a similar story can be seen across our very own comment sections.

So, we hand it over to you. Were you happy with the show? Did it meet your expectations? Or were you hoping for more?

Feel free to expand upon your answer in the comments below, and make sure to check back later to see the poll’s results.

Less than a week after a protected Twitter handle for F-Zero was discovered – featuring a recovery email that seemingly matched Nintendo’s ‘nintendo.co.jp’ address – it now appears to have been confirmed as a fake account.

Since then, the Twitter page has tweeted its first message in the form of a video, and let’s just say it’s not very family-friendly, at all – this indicates it has no connection to Nintendo. According to Google translate, the message attached to the tweet is “I did it” – in other words, it’s likely a cruel joke.

The reason this Twitter account caught the attention of so many in the first place, is not only because the attached email looked like a Nintendo one, but the fact it was created in March 2020 – the same time as the SuperMario35th Twitter page. As one reply puts it:

@Horhey_FF Imagine creating an account 4 months ago just to create a fake leak months later
That’s some next level s***

While some F-Zero fans remain hopeful, others say they were never convinced in the first place:

@HydraBravoWC F-Zero fan here, you never fooled me. All leaks involving F-Zero are fake.

Of course, now all the attention has turned to the Super Mario Twitter account that was discovered earlier last week. As previously mentioned, it was also created in March of this year and has a similar looking email address linked to it. At the time of writing, no tweets have been made by this account.

Is the Mario account also a fake? Or is it the real deal? We’ll leave you to discuss this in the comments below.