From speaking to desktop developers, we’ve heard that you want to learn how to quickly set up continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows for your WPF and Windows Forms applications in order to take advantage of the many benefits CI/CD pipelines have to offer, such as:

• Catch bugs early in the development cycle
• Improve software quality and reliability
• Ensure consistent quality of builds
• Deploy new features quickly and safely, improving release cadence
• Fix issues quickly in production by rolling forward new deployments

That’s why we created a sample application in GitHub to showcase DevOps for your applications using the recently released GitHub Actions.

We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.1. It’s really just a small set of fixes and refinements over .NET Core 3.0, which we released just over two months ago. The most important feature is that .NET Core 3.1 is an long-term supported (LTS) release and will be supported for three years. As we’ve done in the past, we wanted to take our time before releasing the next LTS release. The extra two months (after .NET Core 3.0) allowed us to select and implement the right set of improvements over what was already a very stable base. .NET Core 3.1 is now ready to be used wherever your imagination or business need takes it.

You can download .NET Core 3.1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux:

• .NET Core 3.1 SDK and Runtime
• Docker container images
• Snap installer

ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also being released today.

Visual Studio 2019 16.4 was also released today and includes .NET Core 3.1. It is a required update to use .NET Core 3.1 with Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2019 users, we recommend simply updating Visual Studio to 16.4 and instead of separately downloading .NET Core 3.1.

Visual Studio for Mac also supports and includes .NET Core 3.1, in the Visual Studio for Mac 8.4 Preview channel. You will need to opt into the Preview channel to use .NET Core 3.1.

Release notes:

• .NET Core 3.1 release notes
• GitHub issue for .NET Core 3.1 issues
• GitHub release

We are excited to announce .NET Core support for Pulumi! This announcement means you can declare cloud infrastructure — including all of Azure, such as Kubernetes, Functions, AppService, Virtual Machines, CosmosDB, and more — using your favorite .NET language, including C#, VB.NET, and F#. This brings the entire cloud to your fingertips without ever having to leave your code editor, while using production-ready «infrastructure as code» techniques.

ML.NET is a cross-platform, machine learning framework for .NET developers, and Model Builder is the UI tooling in Visual Studio that uses Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) to easily allow you to train and consume custom ML.NET models. With ML.NET and Model Builder, you can create custom machine learning models for scenarios like sentiment analysis, price prediction, and more without any machine learning experience!

ML.NET Model Builder

This release of Model Builder comes with bug fixes and two exciting new features:

• Image classification scenario – locally train image classification models with your own images
• Try your model – make predictions on sample input data right in the UI