#net-core-3-1 — Public Fediverse posts

Our NuGet total downloads reached 2M!

We have finally reached 2 million downloads across all our NuGet packages, which consist of both the current and the past libraries that have been downloaded over the lifetime of our NuGet feed existence that started on August 2019. Thanks to everyone who have tried out our packages and used them in their applications!

This is a minor milestone, but we are aiming for major ones, such as 5 million downloads across all packages. To celebrate this milestone, we’re introducing brand new versions of libraries. This is to add new features and to improve existing ones.

Nitrocid 0.1.3 is going to have a major arrangement overhaul when it comes to the API, so we’re going to mark this by increasing the API version to v4.0 from v3.1 as it’s a huge breaking change. This will make sure that the Nitrocid application acts like a “launcher” for the core Nitrocid kernel, which, in turn, depends on the base kernel library. This is vaguely similar to how v0.0.20 was developed.

Textify will be updated to improve the RTL reverse performance by getting rid of the libicu library in favor of the more efficient method after this experiment proves successful. As always, we are aiming to change how we make experiments to make sure that they don’t hinder the final production code, but, sometimes, we’d release a version that includes such experiments to gather feedback.

We are going to try reducing the distribution size of Terminaux starting from v7.0, and Beta 3 will include this improvement to ensure that we reduce the download size, especially for future Nitrocid versions. We have already updated Terminaux 6.1.x to include this improvement, and docs have been already updated to reflect this change.

Finally, we are going to introduce some subtle changes to the CI system across all projects, as well as some more build system improvements that we’ve promised, to improve build times and to increase reliability. This applies to developers only.

Enjoy!

Nitrocid KS 0.1.0 – Final – Magic Bloom

This is the moment that all of you have been waiting for! Before going to the subject, we need to tell you the history of Nitrocid KS when it was Kernel Simulator in 2018. If you want to go straight to the announcement, skip to the below section colored in yellow.

History of N-KS

When Nitrocid 0.0.1 (Kernel Simulator back then) was released in February 2018, we had focused on the core features of the kernel that didn’t make its way to the final release, and it worked only on Windows systems that had .NET Framework 4.0 installed. Since then, various features were planned to be added to the kernel, but it required us to separate them into various different major versions.

The first version of the simulated kernel had only the most basic features, including hardware parsing and the minimal shell that only supported one-word commands with no arguments and switches. It was also colorless due to not using the colors feature in the console.

Since then, the second version, 0.0.2, came out with colors and versions after that came with many new features, such as languages on 0.0.6, command arguments on 0.0.4, increased color support to 256 colors on 0.0.8, settings application on 0.0.12, dynamic themes on 0.0.16, splashes and true color on 0.0.20, and command autocompletion and conditions on 0.0.24.

This is a huge leap forward, especially considering that this project wasn’t expected to be this big, so we’ve made several separations from this project’s source code, including the latest separation, Terminaux. Nitrocid heavily depends on it because it was a library that provided all console tools necessary for all our projects (and hopefully yours) to look nice.

The separation began as early as 2020 when extensions and things unrelated to the kernel were being developed, with the release of Extensification (deprecated) and Inxi.NET (deprecated because of SpecProbe). Since then, various things have been developed, and some of them have come from Nitrocid itself.

The overall state of 0.0.24, however, has convinced us to start afresh starting from August 10th, 2022, leading to a version that we have been talking to you about, with its three beta releases and a release candidate:

• Beta 1 (February 22nd, 2023)
• Beta 2 (August 10th, 2023)
• Beta 3 (December 28th, 2023)
• RC (February 1st, 2024)

And now, we’re introducing you to a totally fresh new version of the kernel simulator that not only got a massive overhaul, but its codebase too…

Nitrocid KS 0.1.0!

Nitrocid KS 0.1.0 boasts a big amount of mind-blowing features, including endless amounts of additions and improvements. Let’s detail a few of the hit features, and we’ll hide the rest for you to discover as a surprise!

Fact: Did you know that Nitrocid KS 0.0.24.0 in its codebase was actually a preparatory stage for this version of Nitrocid?

When it comes to mods, we have simplified the screensaver and the splash addition from separate DLL files to their own individual managers with their associated register and unregister functions that allow you to add and remove your splashes and screensavers from your mods. Your mods can also load early, in case you want to add splashes.

When it comes to interactives, we have improved a lot in this area by making it more dynamic. This ensures that you can resize the console without worrying about making the display unreadable until you manually refresh it. This improvement has been brought to different versions of Terminaux during the whole development of this version of Nitrocid KS.

Kernel addons have also been introduced to the kernel, and it allows us to make two versions of the kernel: lite and full. The lite version can be upgraded to the full version of the kernel by a single command, getaddons. This allows us to update the non-core kernel parts without affecting the core kernel parts. In addition to that, your kernel modifications can communicate with kernel addons. They can also talk to each other, making the modifications dependent on each other. This is the reason we’ve added mod dependencies.

The interactive file manager has been introduced to the kernel in order to be able to manage your files interactively without any single command. Just write “ifm” to get started! This was planned in 2018, and this version was the time that this feature has come to fruition.

The hardware parsing feature got a significant performance boost with the help of the latest library, SpecProbe, that allows your .NET applications, such as Nitrocid, to parse your hardware faster than Inxi.NET that relied on management frameworks to get hardware information. SpecProbe finds the fastest way to get information about your hardware, beating Inxi.NET to deprecation and removal.

We’ve also added countless amounts of screensavers to ensure more flexibility of the choices. These screensavers can be used once you’ve installed the screensaver packs addon.

And the rest? Figure them out yourselves.

Get ready!

Are you excited? Get ready for this release and download it now!

See you soon!

.NET 9.0 still supports ARM32

This article applies to users who own ARM32-based boards, including old Android phones and old embedded devices that use that chip. ARM64 users are not affected.

The upcoming short-term release version of .NET that is planned to be released on November 2024, which is .NET 9.0, can still be run on ARM32 devices. Here’s the story behind this support.

Proposal

On June 21st, 2022, when .NET 7.0 was still in its preview stages, the .NET team brought up a discussion about dropping support for the 32-bit ARM processors for .NET 9.0 and later. The thread started with “We’re hyper-focused on Arm64 and x64 (alpha order). They are both critical to us. As it relates to Arm, all of our effort has gone into Arm64/Armv8. There have been no substantial improvements in Arm32/Armv7. We’re not focused on it. We’ve started to talk about dropping support for it.”

In the same discussion, the team also suggested that their current thinking was to “support Arm32 through .NET 7 and 8 and then end support after that (with .NET 9).” Ideally, .NET 7.0 and .NET 8.0 were both released for all the supported architectures, including devices with ARM32 boards.

They have also been informed that “there is at least one party that we know has a hard dependency on Arm32.”

The developers commented on their opinions about dropping support for ARM32. Some developers agreed to drop the support for ARM32 processors, and some developers didn’t agree to drop it.

Official statement

It has been concluded that the .NET team won’t drop support for ARM32 processors for .NET 9.0 or higher. Here’s an answer that was posted four months ago as of this writing:

Official answer:

We are NOT dropping Linux Arm32 with .NET 9. It will be supported. There are no plans to revisit this decision.

I apologize for not offering clarity sooner. A number of customers have asked about this, and we are happy to support them.

richlander

So, you can still run .NET 9.0 applications on ARM32 devices when this version of .NET gets released on November 2024.

Check the .NET 9.0 planning milestone here.

Meanwhile, you can download and install .NET 8.0 on your ARM32 device using this website.

Enjoy!

GRILO – Bootloader Simulator

After four years of no major application after Kernel Simulator, which was out in 2018, we finally decided to release the bootloader simulator imagined, called GRILO!

You may be surprised by the origin of the name, but it’s a portmanteau of both names of the famous Linux bootloader still used by now, GNU GRUB, and the abandoned legacy Linux bootloader used by the first Linux distributions, LILO. If we combined between “GRUB” and “LILO”, one of the mashed-up words would be GRILO.

However, it’s nowhere near GRUB and LILO as it still is in the very basic state. However, we’re constantly expanding it to try to support all bootloader features across GRILO releases.

Let’s stop talking and start explaining about what we made so far. By the way, the paths that the GRILO program uses are found under either %localappdata% in Windows or .config under Linux.

Bootable Applications

Bootable applications are just normal .NET executable files that implement the IBootable interface. These applications are usually defined with their own BootMetadata.json files that define several boot options for the same application. They usually come with this format.

[
    {
        "OverrideTitle": "Name",
        "Arguments": []
    }
    {
        "OverrideTitle": "Name2",
        "Arguments": [ "Arg1", "Arg2" ]
    }
]

For example, the demo bootable application shipped with the GRILO release has the Metadata file that looks like this:

[
    {
        "OverrideTitle": "GRILO Bootable App Demonstration",
        "Arguments": []
    },
    {
        "OverrideTitle": "GRILO Bootable App Demonstration (with arguments)",
        "Arguments": [ "hello", "hello world" ]
    },
    {
        "OverrideTitle": "GRILO Bootable App Demonstration (test boot fail)",
        "Arguments": [ "fail", "hello world" ]
    }
]

These are used by GRILO to define boot entries of a bootable application. There can be more than one entry in one metadata file, in case you want to make different boot entries that use different arguments.

These bootable apps are located under GRILO/Bootables.

Boot styles

The boot styles customize how GRILO draws the boot menu entry and its highlight. They add awesomeness to the boot loader.

You can make your own custom boot styles using the simple API documentation under this link. The DLLs can be found under GRILO/Styles.

Bootloader configuration

The bootloader can also be configured. When GRILO starts for the first time, you’ll have a configuration file placed under GRILO/BootloaderConfig.json that has the following configuration entries:

• Boot style: The name of the boot style from either the pre-defined ones (Default so far), or the custom ones.
• Diagnostic messages: Prints the diagnostic messages to the debug log file.
• Print diagnostic messages to console: If the diagnostic messages are enabled, if printing them to console is also enabled, they’ll get printed to the console as they get written to the debug log file.
• Additional bootable folders: Specifies these additional bootable folders to be scanned for boot files and the metadata file.

Controls

Finally, we also want to talk about the bootloader controls used commonly. GRUB and LILO usually use top and bottom arrows to select the entries and the enter key to boot the selected entry.

In GRILO, these keys are used:

• Top and Bottom Arrows: They are used to select boot apps
• ENTER: Boots to the selected entry by invoking IBootable.Boot()
• Right Arrow: Same as the ENTER key

Get it!

If you are excited, why not try this application out by checking the Releases? If you’re a console artist and want to make boot styles or something else for the GRILO bootloader, check out its NuGet package. If you want to make your application bootable, check out GRILO.Boot.