Microsoft's sunsetting of its exclusive proprietary Windows-centric .NET Framework continues as the company has open sourced some of its most popular desktop components: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI).

One of the major updates of ASP.NET Core 3 is to include support for building windows desktop application using Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (called WPF) and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). It enables us to add client-side development using Razor Components. In .Net Core 3, Entity Framework will support  Azure COSMOS DB. ASP.NET Core 3 will include support for C# 8 and .NET standard 2.1. 

You can Download and get started with .NET Core 3 Preview 1 right now on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Windows Desktop Comes to .NET Core

The earlier version of .NET Core (.Net Core 1.0 and .Net Core 2.0) was focused on web application, Web APIs, IoT and console applications. Now, .Net Core 3 has increased its support for building Windows desktop application by using Windows Forms Framework, WPF with modern controls and smooth designing with Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI) through XAML. With the inclusion of Entity Framework 6 on .Net core 3, Developer will be able to take an advantage of the new features.Such as Side by side deployment, self-contained applications (shipping .NET Core inside the application), the latest improvements in CoreFX, and many more.

.Net framework is becoming more modern, open sourced, cross-platform alternative with various additional features and services leaving behind the traditional Windows only .Net Framework. Now, the developers will be able to create WinForms and WPF desktop applications with .NET Core 3.

"Developers can now participate with Microsoft's client UX technology in a much more interactive way," Microsoft said. "They'll be able to contribute a new feature back to the framework, debug and fix issues that impact their apps, build a private copy of the UI stack, as well as report bugs and other issues. Moving to GitHub provides a greater degree of transparency between the product team and the community, helps democratize Windows development, and encourages more developers to build for Windows."

Microsoft also made some of the major notable announcements. They are:

• .NET Core 2.2 general availability (see more here)

• ML.NET 0.8 public preview (see more here and here)

• Xamarin.Forms 3.4 general availability (see more here)

• Xamarin.Forms 4.0 public preview (see more here)

• Azure Machine Learning service general availability (see more here)

• Azure Cognitive Services updates (see more here and here)

• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac preview (see more here) 

After all these new announcements and features provided by the Microsoft till present day and the days to come, It will definitely create a great programming environment for the developers  with plenty of attractive features  in the upcoming versions.