.NET 5 is the 5th major version of the .NET framework, the bedrock of modern Microsoft platform development, and it’s out today!
(For the official details, check out the announcement on the .NET Blog: Announcing .NET 5.0.)
In addition to being the replacement for .NET Framework 4.8 as well as .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5 unifies the various flavors of .NET — “.NET Framework”, .Net Core, Mono, the various Xamarins, Unity, and Universal Windows Platform — into a more cohesive whole.
With this new version of .NET come new versions of its programming languages: C# 9 and F#5, as well as ASP.NET Core and EF Core.
Once again, it’s this Saturday, it’s online, and it’s free-as-in-beer to attend. REGISTER HERE.
The conference will be made of bite-size (15 minutes or shorter!) presentations by Tampa Bay techies and demos of capstone projects by Suncoast Developers Guild alums.
I’ll be presenting on PyGame!
I’ll be doing a presentation in the afternoon, on the topic of…
…PyGame! I try to keep my topics both technical and fun, and what’s more technical and fun than Python and game development?
There will be coding, and I’ll also provide source code and a free book.
What was the last Suncoast Developers Conference like?
The last conference took place in the summer, and was also free and online. You can watch the entire thing below…
…and if you want to jump to a specific presentation, use these links:
In another life, I was a developer evangelist who travelled across North America and I saw tech scenes from Palo Alto to Peoria. I can tell you that one of the signs of a healthy tech community in a small- to medium-sized city is a coding school that acts as a social/technical/gathering place. If your city had one, things were looking up for local techies. If not, it was a safe bet that the place was experiencing a brain drain.
Here in Tampa Bay, Suncoast Developers Guild fills that vital role, and it does so spectacularly. They’re a key part of the heart and soul of tech in the area, and it shows in their efforts, such as events like this.
This is the first in “Cobra Pi”, a series of articles on getting the most out of your Raspberry Pi!
Yes, you can run Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi!
You’ve got many options for editing code or other plain text files on your Raspberry Pi. It is, after all, a Linux machine, and you’ve got all the classic command-line editors — vim, emacs, and…
And the windows-and-mouse-based Geany (text editor) and Thonny (beginner-friendly Python IDE) come along with even the bare-bones version of the Raspberry Pi OS setup.
For the Raspberry Pi, you want to download the Debian package for systems with ARM processors (click on the ARM button in the .deb row).
Once downloaded, go to your Downloads directory and double-click on the the .deb file you just downloaded. You’ll see greeted with this dialog box:
Click the Install button. You’ll be presented with another dialog box, this time asking for your user password, since it’s required when installing new applications:
Enter the password you use to log into the Raspberry Pi into the Password field and click OK.
Visual Studio Code will be installed on your Pi. Once the process is done, you can launch it by clicking on the Start Menu (the raspberry icon in the upper left-hand corner)…
…and in the menu that appears, select the Programming menu. A sub-menu will appear, and one of the items will be Visual Studio Code. Click that and…
Tap to view at full size.
You’ll be in the Visual Studio Code that you know and love from Windows, macOS, and Linux! And yes, all the plugins that you’ve come to depend on will be available.
The Raspberry Pi 400 — a Raspberry Pi 4 board with 4GB RAM built into a compact keyboard — was announced just today, and the base unit (just the computer built into the compact keyboard) retails for $70!
The computer
Tap to view at full size.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a slightly updated model from last year’s Raspberry Pi 4, and has these specs:
Feature
Notes
Processor
1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A72 CPU
(A little faster than the Raspberry Pi 4’s 1.5 GHz CPU)
RAM
4 GB
Networking
802.11ac wifi
Gigabit Ethernet
Bluetooth 5.0
Video
2 micro HDMI ports that can each drive 4K/60 Hz video
USB
2 USB 3.0 ports
1 USB 2.0 port (preferably for the mouse)
Power
Provided via adapter and USB-C
Additional ports
40-pin GPIO interface
The complete kit
Tap to view at full size.
For an extra $30, you can get the kit, which is the complete “ready to go out of the box” package. It starts with the Raspberry Pi 400 computer-in-a-keyboard unit described above, and it adds:
The kind of computer that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s
Let’s quickly take stock of what you get with just the Raspberry Pi 400, never mind the kit:
A fully-equipped computer with a decent processor, decent RAM, wifi/wired/Bluetooth networking with 2 fast USB ports to spare once you’ve plugged a mouse into the slower one.
A computer that you can do hardware experiments with, thanks to its GPIO pins, and an abundance of hobbyist-focused expansion kits.
A computer that you can plug into your TV.
A computer that costs $100.
There hasn’t been a computer like this since the machines pictured below came out…
…and those machines couldn’t hold a candle to the proper desktops of that era.
On the other hand, you’ll find that the Raspberry Pi 400 can easily keep up with the sort of computer that gets issued for standard office work. You could easily use it to do schoolwork or office work, and it’s actually a decent Linux software development machine and retro-style gaming console, too! And with its expansion capabilities, it’s an excellent machine for IoT and sensor projects.
This is the sort of machine that children of the 1980s and early 1990s learned on, many of whom are today’s techies…
…and this machine will probably be the machine that a lot of children of the 2020s will cut their programming teeth on, and who’ll be the techies of the 2040s and 2050s.
Given a choice between a Chromebook and a Raspberry Pi 400, I’d take the Pi, because I can do a lot more with it. In fact, I might be able to do a lot of my new job with it (which is something I might try soon, just to see what happens).
By the bye, keep an eye on this blog for a new feature: Cobra Pi, which covers programming on the Raspberry Pi, and whose motto is: “Code hard! Fail fast! No latency!”
It’ll cover all sorts of cool programming tips, tricks, and techniques on the Raspberry Pi, including JavaScript, Python, and even C and ARM assembly language!
.NET 5 is the 5th major version of the .NET framework, the bedrock of modern Microsoft platform development, and it’s out today!
