.NETpad Resurrections (Premium)

With .NET 6 now available, I’ve been looking over the four versions of .NETpad that I created a few years back to see how they can be modernized. There are some obvious strategies. And some obvious roadblocks too.

As a reminder, I wrote four versions of .NETpad: the original version with Windows Forms, Visual Basic.NET, and the .NET Framework; a second version with Windows Forms, C#, and the .NET Framework (which I never documented), a version using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), C#, and .NET Core 3.1, and a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version with C#. Each is, in its own way, pretty memorable, and each has its charms … and its deficiencies, some related to the underlying technology and some to my own inexperience.

The most recent of those versions dates back to the first half of 2020. Since then, I’ve debated where to go next. I’ve researched Microsoft technologies, web technologies like React and React Native, and third-party solutions like Google Flutter. I’ve watched as Microsoft followed up .NET Core 3.1 with .NET 5 and then, more recently, .NET 6. I’ve waited to see what happened with Project Reunion, which has finally shipped as the Windows App SDK, and .NET MAUI, which will be finalized by mid-2022.

In mid-2021, I thought I had the answer in Blazor, a set of web technologies based on .NET and C#. And in the June 14 issue of the Thurrott Premium newsletter, I wrote an editorial, “Create,” I explained my choice.

So what happened?

Simple: Windows 11 happened, upending these and other series I had planned. I downloaded the first leaked version of Windows 11 the day after I wrote about Blazor and used it full-time on a trip to Mexico City before Microsoft officially unveiled the new platform on June 24. Windows 11 consumed me for the rest of 2021, in part because I had a major new book to write---so much for the tiny Windows 10 21H2 update I was expecting---and in part because Microsoft decided to ship Windows 11 less than three months after it was first announced. Windows has always been at the center of everything I do, and so I pretty much dropped everything else.

Over the holiday 2021 break, however, I started thinking about the projects I had set aside, and about how I might manage my time a little better. The first step was to fire up the long-overdue second half of my epic Programming Windows series. Other steps include figuring out future programming projects---the subject of this article---and my also-overdue exploration of Linux, which I will also start soon.

I’ve been looking over my .NETpad projects and I re-read a good chunk of the first Windows Forms series I wrote. And I have to say, it’s pretty special. It was written with a bit of faith that I could get up to speed quickly---I was a “professional” programmer of sorts at one point in my career, but those days are long over and I’d never seriously worked with .NET before---and that readers would get me over past ...