Perhaps the greatest success in .NET 5 is that it launched precisely on time. A year ago, its release date was set for N

Now it’s time to divide up your email list into segments. When I send writing emails to the writer segment of my email list they have a 45% open rate. When I send broad emails to everybody on my email list they have a 24% open rate. See the difference. Hyper-focused emails to the right audience, on the right topic, crush it.

But here’s the catch. Xamarin didn’t just use a scaled-down .NET runtime, it also used a different UI model — one based in XAML, influenced by WPF, but still thoroughly its own. In other words, Xamarin is one more awkward island. It doesn’t mesh with Blazor on the web side, or with any of the Windows toolkits on the desktop side.

Under the heading of “nice little things that are actually much more difficult than they seem,” Microsoft has been trying to deliver a true single-file deployment solution for quite some time. In .NET 5, they didn’t quite succeed.

This change isn’t all bad. Having extra languages splits the developer ecosystem, and there’s no point encouraging developers to code in VB if the documentation, examples, and .NET communities are all talking in C#. But it’s still a sad ending for one of the world’s most influential languages.

The Project Reunion features were initially slated for .NET 5, but they missed the cut. They’re currently a part of the WinUI 3 library, which is floating in preview limbo.

The goal of single-file deployment is to package an application and all its dependencies in a single executable file. When you launch the file, the runtime unpacks the resources and loads them dynamically. Simple, right? Not so fast.

The bottom line is that you’re hoping for an easier way to create native applications on a variety of platforms, you’re stuck waiting. Or, you can consider a third-party tool, like the excellent Uno Platform.

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Your friends were so bored during lockdown they finally got around to The Crack-Up. You’ll have to wait another 100 years for the next life-altering pandemic before they get around to Shore, even though you swear it’s more accessible and “there are ACTUAL DRUMS.”

As always, .NET 5 also includes updated versions of its core languages, C# 9 and F# 5. The changes in C# aren’t as dramatic as they’ve been in some previous versions (remember the introduction of generics and LINQ?). But they’re still significant.

For a while, Microsoft was promising that this ambitious change would happen in time for .NET 5, but it eventually slipped to .NET 6. (They specifically blamed the coronavirus for the delay, if you’re looking for another reason to hate 2020.)

In second place? You must mean the nicely crafted but very niche F#, a language explicitly designed for functional programming. Its most important contribution just might be the way it keeps nudging C# to add more functional features.

Microsoft had solution for that, too, called .NET MAUI (for Multi-platform App UI). It’s an evolution of Xamarin that allows you to target mobile Android and iOS platforms, and desktop Windows applications (WPF or UWP), with everything magically bundled into a single project. It might even integrate with the world of standard web applications through Blazor.

It turns out that there are operating system and security considerations that complicate the picture. The solution Microsoft settled on generates a true single-file package that works flawlessly on Linux. But on Windows and macOS computers, you still need to include a few separate runtime files and distribute them alongside your “single-file” executable. Microsoft explains the reasons for this painful compromise here, and plans to revisit the issue again in .NET 6, with no guarantee that the situation will improve.

Although there’s still no sign of a single technology that can replace them all, Microsoft is trying to break down some of the walls that separate them. They launched Project Reunion, an initiative that will let Windows Forms and WPF applications use the FluentUI bits from UWP. Even more exciting, there’s a possibility that they’ll extend support beyond Windows 10, and all the way back to Windows 8.1.

As for VB, once the world’s most popular hobbyist language and a side-by-side equal to C#, it’s now little more than a legacy. You can use VB with some older project types, most notably Windows Forms and WPF. (This is an improvement over the non-existent support offered in the most recent version of .NET Core.) But ASP.NET? Not if you want project support and Visual Studio designers. In fact, there’s more ASP.NET support for F# than there is for VB, and C# remains the clear favorite across the board.