Languages and Frameworks 92. .NET 7 Native AOT Assess .NET 7 Native AOT is a big step forward in a long line of approaches to deploying .NET applications natively. It does away with IL and JIT at runtime entirely. Introduced in .NET 7, this improvement is particularly significant for running .NET applications in serverless functions. This new deployment option eliminates the cold start issue, which has been a persistent problem for .NET on serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. With Native AOT, you can generate a smaller deployable binary than previous methods, resulting in faster cold start times. AWS has officially embraced Native AOT, supporting it with their Amazon Lambda Tools. This new deployment option brings .NET 7 on par with TypeScript/JavaScript in terms of cold start times, making it a viable option for organizations with a largely .NET-oriented infrastructure. 93. .NET MAUI Assess .NET MAUI is a new cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML. It allows the creation of apps that can run on Android, iOS, macOS and Windows from a single shared codebase. However, as a new technology, the ecosystem around MAUI is not as developed as React Native or other cross-system platforms, and it only supports C#. Additionally, MAUI may face challenges encountered by organizations using Xamarin in the past, including poor cross-platform tooling, mobile integration problems, developer availability and an immature ecosystem. While Microsoft announced their commitment to MAUI as an open-source, mobile-first framework for mobile development, its success has yet to be proven. If you’re already using Xamarin, you may want to assess MAUI as a potential upgrade; however, if C# or Xamarin isn’t part of your tool set yet, you may want to approach MAUI with some caution until the technology is more widely adopted and proven in the market. 94. dbt-expectations Assess dbt-expectations is an extension package for dbt inspired by Great Expectations. Data quality is an important tenet of data governance, so when it comes to automated data governance, it’s important to craft built-in controls that flag anomalies or quality issues in data pipelines. Just as unit tests run in a build pipeline, dbt-expectations makes assertions during the execution of a data pipeline. In the dbt world, you can run Great Expectations–style data quality tests on your warehouse directly within dbt. Our teams have been exploring this, and it made sense to highlight it. 95. Directus Assess We’ve used Directus as a headless content management system (CMS). Although we have options when it comes to headless CMS products, we needed a self-hosted solution with rich digital asset management and content authoring workflows. In this evaluation we find Directus to be a good fit for our needs; we quite like its event-driven data processing and automation via flows. © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 42