Welcome 2017 – The Year of 3D? – csharp.christiannagel.com

I wish all the readers of my blog

A Happy New Year 2017!!

May all your wishes come true!

What do I expect from 2017? Here I’m summarizing some of my thoughts and expectations.

3D

Windows 8 already included support for 3D printing. Printers from different vendors are available.
A few years ago I learned that Barilla is working on a 3D printer to print noodles. To see the actual developments I checked the current status on food printing – and was surprised that there’s already a conference just about food printing. Development in this area is really fast.

Since a few years, Microsoft’s HoloLens is available in the developer edition. Some markets have been added in the last year. I think we can expect a release of HoloLens in 2017.

HoloLens is an expensive device because it needs great hardware. Everything is included with the glasses. Wearing HoloLens you are autonomous without a connected powerful PC. However, there are different options. What’s great is that the same API is available for different vendors. Using Holographic apps, users are not restricted on using the expensive HoloLens. Cheaper devices with less functionality are available as well. This will increase the usage and add the interest to create apps.

2D apps can be built to be accessed from HoloLens. However, to make holographic apps more useful, 3D models are needed. I think an important factor for a huge success of Holographic is to make it easy to create 3D models.

As it looks like, this is a feature coming to Windows 10 with the Creators Update. The new version of Microsoft Paint – Paint 3D – makes it soooo easy to create 3D models. I didn’t expect it to be that easy, but it is. Just try it out. Like Paint is an easy starter to create images, Paint 3D is an easy starter to create 3D models. For many cases, Paint is all what’s needed to create or adapt images. This is similar with Paint 3D – for many cases, Paint 3D is all what’s needed to create or adapt 3D models. You can also export the created models with 3D FBX or 3MF files, and thus use it from other applications as well.

An easy way to create 3D models is an important factor for the success of Holographic. Paint 3D is part of the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update and makes it extremly easy to create 3D models.

Using Kinect connected to the PC, it is also possbile to scan a real life 3D model to create a 3D mesh. However, I didn’t find it pracical to use the Kinect connected via a cable to the notebook and walk around a model. I think there’s more power to using a phone to scan a 3D model – and this was demonstrated at the at Microsoft’s Windows 10 Creators Update event on Oct-26.

The new 3D features will also create a need for more 3D printers.

I’m seeing 3D as a really important part of 2017, but of course there’s more.

Visual Studio 2017

In 2017 we will see a new release of Visual Studio – Visual Studio 2017. With the new version of Visual Studio you see a major change immediately at istallation time. The installation is very different and can be very fast – depending on the features you select. Selecting the features is becoming a lot easier.

Of course there will also be productivity enhancements with Visual Studio 2017. Docker integration goes major steps to the new container-based environments, live unit testing can give unit testing another boost, intellisense filtering, match highlighting, configuration of coding conventions, and more.

Currently you can try the RC of Visual Studio 2017. However, in a production environment currently you need to be careful in doing this. After installing Visual Studio 2017, you can have some issues with Visual Studio 2015.

With Visual Studio 2017 we’ll also see a release of C# 7.0 including tuples, pattern matching, and more.

.NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0

.NET Standard 2.0 makes it easier to bring legacy .NET applications to the new world. While .NET Standard 1.6 contains 13,501 APIs, version 2.0 extends this to 32,638. This is an increase by 142%. Many parts that are used heavily with .NET Framework applications and were not included in .NET Core are now part of .NET Standard 2.0. This is what makes it a lot easier to bring legacy .NET Framework applications to the new standard. .NET 4.6 implements .NET Standard 2.0.

.NET Core 2.0 (previously known as .NET Core 1.2) is another implementation of .NET Standard 2.0. While all APIs of the .NET Standard 2.0 are implemented, some (such as AppDomain.CreateDomain) might throw PlatformNotSupportedException.

With the new major version of .NET Core we’ll see .NET Core becoming mature. What I see as even more important than the new major version is the release of the tools. We’ve been struggling for too long in interim states with project.json and the migration to .csproj. The release of the tools and the final move to .csproj will bring some stability and many more reasons to move to .NET Core.

In 2017 we’ll see the release of the .NET Core tools. Together with an easier way bringing legacy .NET applications to the new standard, this will bring a new momentum to .NET Core.

Xamarin

Visual Studio 2017 and .NET Core brought some fluent changes to Xamarin developers and didn’t help with stability. As the foundation matures, this will also help Xamarin.

Professional C

With the release of Visual Studio 2017 and C# 7.0, I’ll offer PDF files for download related to my book Professional C# 6 and .NET Core 1.0. You can use all the code samples with Visual Studio 2017, and also learn about new C# 7.0 features with the downloads. Just get the book now 🙂

Summary

2017 will be a year with great 3D features, improvements to .NET Core and its tooling, a new version of Visual Studio, a new version of C#, the Windows 10 Creators Update, and more. Looking forward to a great year.

Have fun with programming and learning!
Christian

More information on .NET Core, programming UWP applications, ASP.NET Core, Azure, and more is available in my workshops.