News from Connect(); Microsoft open sources WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI, and announces public preview of Visual Studio 2019

We’re expecting to hear a bunch of news from Microsoft’s arguably underrated Connect() developer conference this week.

Perhaps, as a preamble to the virtual conference today, Microsoft announced the open sourcing of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI) via its new purchased platform, GitHub.

While Microsoft announcing open source projects isn’t much of news these days as the company continues to embrace the open source community, the reveal of these projects also come as packaged news alongside the first public preview of Visual Studio 2019 which is said to be increasing coding space as well as including smarter debugging and refactoring technology.

As a bridge for developers who are looking forward to using the newly open sourced frameworks, Microsoft is also making .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 available.

According to Scott Guthrie the Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group in Microsoft .NET Core 3.0 comes with:

• Run multiple instances of .NET Core 3.0 side-by-side on the same computer so you can update WPF and Windows Forms apps to a new version of .NET without updating the entire OS.
• Use modern controls and Fluent styling from the WinUI XAML Library via XAML Islands from .NET Core 3.0 apps.

Developers eager to try out the improved VS 2019, the can do so without having to get rid of their VS 2017 instances. Apparently VS 2019 can now run alongside VS 2017 installations and for the handful of VS developers using Macs and there will be a public preview for VS 2019 available soon. VS 2019 for Mac will mostly be conceived of a rebranded Xamarin Studio framework that will include a new welcome screen and code editor UI.

Microsoft has yet to offer an official date or time for the release of VS 2019, but public previews are usually a good sign of an impending release.