Co-Chairs Olson and Boyz, Honorary Chair Olson and members of the Task Force. As Chief Justice, I want to welcome you to New Hampshire. Our story is about tough choices for improving access to justice in the face of a severe decline in our state resources and little likelihood of more money in the future. A year ago, my predecessor as Chief Justice, Dean John Broderick, described our situation this way. In short, we have no choice. The judicial branch can either continue down the path of incremental reductions in service or we can seek those innovations that will permit the courts to meet the needs of our 21st century constituents. He was right. Like our colleagues around the country, we cut away at our operations to meet budget reductions. We closed our courthouses for a total of 12 days in fiscal year 11 and all judges, administrators and staff took unpaid furlough days. We cut jury trials by a third. With the concurrence of the governor, nine judgeships remain vacant. We held open more than 10% of non-judicial staff jobs, which inevitably slows down case processing. Some courts began closing a few afternoons a week just to allow for uninterrupted time to process cases. That remains true today. Judge days in our district court and family division, which handle more than 80% of our work, were cut back ultimately by 20%. This year, my colleagues and I on the Supreme Court knew that we could not demand more handouts from the legislature. That was unrealistic considering the state's still dire economic condition. We had to work with lawmakers in the best interests of the judicial branch. At the same time, we knew that we had to do a better job managing what resources we are allotted. In short, we had to change. We also made a fundamental decision. We concluded that it is unfair to continue to try to balance the budget by closing the courts to the public. So there will be no more unpaid furlough days in the New Hampshire court system. Our doors will be open. Our judges, administrators and staff will be at work five days a week.  We knew though that by giving up the savings from furlough days, we would have to find the money elsewhere, and that meant making painful reductions in our staff, which ironically also slows down our operations and delays access to justice. But we had to move forward. First, through an extraordinary effort by our administrative judges and staff and with the support of the governor and the state legislature, we are about to execute dramatic restructuring that will make our system more efficient and improve, we hope, access to justice. On July 1 of this year, we will merge our district and probate courts and our family division into a single circuit court system. Overall management restructuring will save more than $1.4 million a year. By January of 2012, we will have established a single circuit court call center to provide prompt, efficient service to citizens while freeing up our staff and the courts to focus on case processing. Video conferencing capabilities will be expanded to cut costs of transporting prisoners to courthouses for arraignments and other hearings. Every court location, every county jail, the state prison and the offices of the public defender will be connected. We will hire 20 part-time employees who will work off hours for the circuit court processing cases. Pilot projects have demonstrated as much as a 100% increase in efficiency working off hours. With financial backing from the state legislature, we will launch a paperless e-court system that will include e-filing, electronic payment of fees and fines, digitization of court records and electronic access to court records by litigants, attorneys and members of the public. That is an investment in the future that will provide efficiencies and we hope better service for the public. We have also backed legislation that would consolidate two of our busiest jury trial courts in a newly renovated courthouse. Not all the lawyers are happy about this, but we project the merger will produce major savings and efficiencies in case processing. The New Hampshire Judicial Branch Innovation Commission, which was the catalyst behind this dramatic restructuring, the Commission, which created a mandate for change, was John Broderick's idea when he was Chief Justice and then he left and left it to me. But we've seen it through. However, even with this huge effort to enact change and the savings that will result, this year our anticipated appropriation is still $3.2 million short of what we need to operate at our reduced FY11 levels. As we all know, court systems are people intensive organizations. We do not have programs to cut. So to help fill the gap, we cut our staff. That was the hardest choice of all. Earlier this month, we implemented a reduction in force of 73 positions throughout the court system, including layoffs and early retirements. In February, we had 527 non-judicial employees in our courts. By the end of summer, we will have 454 non-judicial personnel, a 13% recent reduction in staff. This was on top of about 100 staff jobs that were already being held vacant. That's the difficult reality of our state court and the public it serves, now and into the future. In closing, I commend this task force for its effort to shine a public spotlight on the issue of underfunding for our courts and on the impact that has on equal access to justice for all. When it comes to which part of government gets what appropriation, this is the justice system, a core function of government, a branch of government, and that should mean something. But let me say this too, from where I sit and I've been a judge in New Hampshire for more than 30 years, it is also our responsibility to evolve. In New Hampshire, we recognize that it was not possible to continue business as usual while waiting for more revenue to come in from the state house, not in this climate, not in this economy. We had to accept the reality that if we wanted to provide better service to the citizens who need our courts every day, then we were going to have to do things differently, and that's exactly what we're going to do. Thank you. Our panel will have an opportunity to do some questions, but I think after we hear the testimony from them. Chairman Boyd, Chairman Olson, Honorary Chair Olson, Distinguished Members of the Task Force, I'm grateful to all of you and to President Zach for this opportunity to testify today. Every day in courthouses around the country, we see fallout from the troubled economy reflected in our court dockets. In New York, record filings of up to 4.7 million new cases a year, a 33% increase in family violence cases, hundreds of thousands of newly filed consumer credit cases, 76,000 pending foreclosure proceedings, daunting trends by any standard. State courts are truly the emergency room for the ills of society and our caseloads are the proof of that fact. On April 1, New York State adopted a new budget intended to close a $10 billion deficit, which contains traumatic spending cuts for all of state government, including an unprecedented $170 million, or 6.3% reduction in the judiciary's budget. That was $70 million more than I had voluntarily cut from our request, with the results being layoffs of well over 400 court employees, the courthouse day ending a half hour early to avoid overtime costs, sharply curtailed arraignments, and countless other painful measures and service reductions. Press reports, which I know you are familiar with, have graphically described the adverse consequences of this year's budget reduction for the New York judiciary, our court family, and our continued ability to deliver timely and effective justice. My written testimony describes in detail our present circumstances, and I will not belabor those in my remarks today. Because despite it all, in New York and other states, courts are still constitutionally bound to deliver justice. Our doors must and will continue to be open to all. But what is most important is the substance of what takes place behind those doors. How do we preserve access to justice for all in this time of crisis for state judiciaries? A record number of Americans desperately need the protection of our laws but cannot afford a lawyer to help them deal with the essentials of life, a roof over their heads, family stability, personal safety free from domestic violence, access to healthcare and education, or subsistence, income and benefits. Last year 2.3 million litigants appeared in the New York courts without a lawyer, including 98% of tenants in eviction cases, 95% of parents and child support matters, and 2.3 of homeowners facing foreclosure proceedings. Many of our courtrooms are standing room only, filled with vulnerable and frightened unrepresented litigants, many of them newly indigent. Unfortunately for everyone lucky enough to be represented by a legal services provider in New York City, another 8 to 10 are being turned away. We have redoubled our efforts within the judiciary and in partnership with the law to expand pro bono programs and provide more services for the self-represented. But these efforts have not even come close to meeting the overwhelming needs of low income New Yorkers. I have become convinced that the totality of what we are doing in New York and as far as I can see around the country is simply not enough. It is simply not enough to rely on revenue streams like IOLA or court fees that fluctuate with the economy or even to rely on the wonderful good works of the bar. Access to justice cannot be a pay-as-you-go enterprise dependent on funding that is unstable by nature and which often serves to expand access to justice with one hand while creating new obstacles with the other. What is needed, I believe, is the unequivocal commitment of state government to fund civil legal services, a permanent commitment backed by the public FISC that recognizes that civil legal assistance for poor and vulnerable litigants pursuing the necessities of life is a basic responsibility of state government. Every bit is important as the other fundamental priorities of civilized societies and governments. We don't say that there won't be public schools or hospitals this year to serve our children or treat our sick because the economy is bad. Just as we cannot say that we won't fund civil legal services for the indigent because it is too difficult to afford, access to justice is not a luxury affordable only in good times. We can no longer be passive or reticent about this central issue, particularly when state judiciary budgets are in peril and we are looked to for leadership as to our institutional priorities. What do we stand for? On Law Day one year ago, I began our own efforts in New York by forming a task force to expand access to civil legal services headed by the former president of the Federal Legal Services Corporation, Helene Barnett. Last fall, I personally presided over four public hearings around the state along with top leaders of the state bar and the judiciary to assess the extent and nature of the unmet civil legal needs. We all recognized that at the judiciary and the profession in our state did not stand up for civil legal services for the poor no one else would. The legislature adopted a joint resolution endorsing these hearings and requesting that the chief judge report and make recommendations annually to the governor and the legislature on the need for financial resources. In effect, institutionalizing the hearings and putting the stamp of approval on the process we proposed and now will follow year after year, a process that has a direct impact on the judiciary's budget in New York. What we learned from the hearings is that New York is at best meeting only 20% of the civil legal services requirements of the indigent. The task force recommended that the judiciary include $25 million for civil legal services in the budget for this fiscal year as part of a four-year phased-in effort to increase annual funding by $100 million. I requested these monies as being integral to the judiciary's budget because what happens inside every courtroom is our responsibility. Preserving civil legal services for the poor is not tangential to the judiciary, but rather central to carrying out a unique, fundamental constitutional mandate dispensing justice to all of our people. Despite the economic tsunami that we faced and the deep cuts imposed on the judiciary, the final budget approved by the legislature and the governor included $12.5 million for civil legal services and an additional $15 million in our budget to rescue New York's IOLA fund, with the end result being $27.5 million of funding for civil legal services under the umbrella of the judiciary's budget. To me, most importantly, we established a vital precedent for our state and possibly elsewhere by implementing a systemic, annual process to fund civil legal services through state general fund monies that are part and parcel of the judiciary's budget. At the legislature's request, we hold hearings to assess the gap in civil legal representation for the poor. We put monies in the judiciary budget to close or at least narrow that gap and the legislature and the governor act on our budget request. While there is no magic formula for what exact system will work best in New York or elsewhere, we must in every state create the plumbing and infrastructure to ensure stable, consistent funding for civil legal services now and for the future. This is not just a moral and ethical issue.  At our hearings, the most telling testimony was counterintuitive in nature. It came from business leaders, bankers, property owners, healthcare providers, and government and community leaders who stated again and again that increasing access to legal assistance benefited their own institutional performance and financial bottom lines. We created a public record that justified the funding of civil legal services as making good economic sense for our state. Our task force concluded that there is a total return to New York of close to $5 for every dollar spent to support civil legal services by enabling people to pay their bills, preventing unwarranted evictions and homelessness, avoiding foster care placements and other social services costs and bringing federal funds into the state. In the end, there is the absolute necessity of a much greater financial commitment from state government and of strong leadership by judicial and bar leaders in our respective states to establish a systemic, annualized process to fund civil legal services through the public fisk and to be clear again what we are talking about are those indigent litigants with life-altering legal problems. Equal justice for all under the law is inextricably linked to court funding levels. Increasing court funding without ensuring access to justice is a hollow victory. The state courts must have the resources they need, not just as an end to in itself, but to support their constitutional and ethical role as the protector of the legal rights of all Americans. Every person, regardless of means, is entitled to their day in court. The rule of law, the very bedrock of our society, loses its meaning when the protection of our laws is available only to those who can afford it. We might as well close the courthouse doors if we are not able to provide equal justice for all. Our very reason for being, this is the fundamental challenge facing the justice system today in these very trying physical times to state you this year. Thank you. Thank you, Chief Justice. Thank you. Good morning. Let me start by thanking the task force for the work it's doing. I appreciate very much the invitation to testify here this morning. Can everyone here? Be sure. I think, I don't know. Is this, I don't know. I think it's working. Working, okay. And I want to say what, how impressive it is to listen to colleagues at the head of other courts that border our state to hear the work that they're doing. What I'd like to talk to you about is perhaps something a little bit farther down the road. Vermont started dealing with its budget problems about four years ago. Let me put it in this context. Two years ago, Tom Brokaw in a New York Times op-ed called on states to trim their budgets by eliminating waste and duplication in infrastructure. He quoted a member of a special bipartisan state commission that endorsed savings through consolidation of services who said, our system of local government has barely evolved over the past 100 years and we are still governed by the same archaic institutions formed before the invention of the light bulb, telephone, automobile, and computer. Vermont's courts are working hard to change their business model to establish a renewed and resilient system of justice. We are addressing the historic conventions that have prevented us from consolidation of services, working to break down the traditional vulcanized structure of Vermont courts. We're making changes to stabilize court operations in the future even at times of economic uncertainty, but change has not been easy. As the Brokaw piece said, proposed changes to the structure of government will meet stiff resistance from everyone who stands to lose influence or a job. We face such opposition in Vermont, but last year, to the amazement of many, we witnessed reform of the courts when an historic restructuring bill passed the state senate with not a single descending vote and a similar very positive result out of the house. In remarks recently at a ceremony honoring one of our judges who made significant contributions to this effort, the powerful state senator who chairs the Judiciary Committee recalled a meeting we had in December 2009 before the start of the 2010 legislative session when he said, Chief, I've looked over the recommendations of your commission on judicial operations and frankly, there is no chance of this passing. Vermont is a mountainous state with a population that is less than most cities in America, but we support the same infrastructure of many larger states, not in numbers but in form. One could make the argument with states like Vermont for consolidation with contiguous states, at least with respect to some state services. In some measure, an effort to do just that was made more than 200 years ago. It was not any more successful then than I expect it would be now, particularly with respect to the justice system. But provincial concerns tend to define the plight of state government today in every venue when it tries to unwind historic norms. My state is fiercely independent with independent-minded people prone to let their neighbor be. The court system is respected by the people but most associated with the distinguishing features of the local county court. Our trial bench is small. Nearly every judge sits in every court. There are more than a few courthouses where a single multi-jurisdictional judge sits on every single docket, criminal, family, civil, sometimes all on the same day. Historically, the courts in Vermont developed these local county-based institutions even though Vermont does not employ a strong county form of government. Many of the county courthouses are old, iconic New England structures located in the Shire town. The antiquated system had few problems as long as the money was there. But when the economy turned downward, the mandates and statutes for clerks and courts in certain locations around the state, statutory salaries and expenses prevented us from managing the budget to gain efficiencies and to move resources to where the need was greatest. These mandates limited the choices for finding savings when our budget was cut again and again and again. The laws handcuffed the administration of the courts. They required us to spend money where it wasn't needed without regard to duplication or waste. These laws obligated the statewide budget, the statewide judiciary budget, to support county court labor and other expenses over which we had little or no control. Although remnants of the old system remain now, a lot has changed. Under the law passed last year, we are more centralized than disparate in the management of the court structure. Today, the court administrator, Mr. Montpelier, can better address the dockets and courts requiring attention. He can harmonize limited resources with demand. Today, Vermont has moved to the unified court structure that was passed in a constitutional amendment in 1974, but that languished when the legislature failed to follow through with the necessary statutory changes. Why did we wait so long? It took 36 years. The political climate was not right. Many factions within the judiciary itself opposed unification. Obviously, the shrinking budget has helped to make the choices more clear. In contrast to the 70s, over the last few years, the members of the Supreme Court have been unified in the objective to reform the system. The Supreme Court's approach from the outset was not simply to reduce spending. We believe that the court structure needed reform in order to gain efficiency. But more important, reform was required in order to attain stability in the day-to-day operations of the court system. We believed that this was necessary to preserve and improve access to justice. Our goal was to improve the capacity of the judicial system to balance fluctuating appropriations against the ebb and flow of the needs of the citizens of Vermont in all corners of the state. In essence, we sought to increase the elasticity of the resources we have at our disposal. Following the bill last year, we have started down this road, but we are not there yet. And interim dramatic measures have been implemented to address the ongoing funding problems that we have. But there are improvements. A year ago, every court in our state was closed two and a half days every month. And we had a 12% vacancy rate. Today, we have reduced court closings to one day a month and a 1-2% vacancy rate. But we are seeing the consequences of court closings. There is growth of backlog in portions of the domestic docket, time to disposition in TPR cases has spiked, and there are other dockets that lag behind. Court closing dates are stopgap measures. They are not a permanent solution. But now, at least in my state, they threaten to become the norm. That is the problem with stopgap measures. When the state's revenues collapsed, we were forced to tackle our shortfall and took tracks. There was a need to rapidly decrease spending. Everyone in state government had a responsibility to contribute to the solution. We decided that we could not simply say no to budget cuts demanded of us. When we adopted the interim measures, we were clear. Systemic change was the goal, but we needed time, and the immediate solutions were a means to that end. We also acknowledged from the beginning that the cuts to our budget would probably never be replaced. At various times, there has been tremendous pressure on every element in state government to decrease spending. Some of what we did was to manage expectations both internally and externally. The goal was to establish a new business model, identifying the structural problem as the major contributor to the fragility of the system, not only money. While we identified the structural impediments to making better choices and signaled that direction from the start, we did not impose a specific solution, but rather through the commission on judicial operations that we formed, conducted a very intensive evaluation of the courts in order to better understand the problem and thereby propose a more meaningful solution. We held more than 40 focus groups all over the state and solicited response to online questionnaires from everyone, including the public at large. We asked everyone for ideas for saving money, what they thought about regionalization of judicial services, court closings through consolidation, and the facilitator of our sessions began every meeting with the words, hold nothing back, give us your ideas, everything is on the table. We were candid that our desire was to change the structure to more intelligently manage the resources the state and county spend on the courts without reducing judicial services. We made the case that in order to avoid perverse consequences of irrational budget cuts, this was required through reform. We told them metaphorically that what the state needed and didn't have was a traffic cop standing in the middle of an imaginary roundabout, continuously evaluating the flow of the pipelines of all the various dockets regionally and statewide and directing the state's limited resources to the greatest need. The process was useful for a number of reasons. While not everyone agreed on solutions, we gained consensus about the problem. We were able to educate a broad range of people about the structure of the courts and the problems that were created in the economy. We received valuable input about the needs of court users that tended to support structural reform, and we gained support for fixing the structural problem. I recall at one point in the course of this effort, we learned that members of the legislature had begun to hear from constituents about the process and were beginning to appreciate the problem even before the commission's proposals were made. We set high expectations for what we wanted out of this process, identifying access to justice as the core value at stake. We told the focus groups that we were not engaged in an effort to simply cut costs, but more importantly, our objective was to improve the availability of judicial services through better management. The day the legislation passed, I'll never forget, it was a Saturday afternoon and was a tremendous moment. With the tools we have now through restructuring improvements, with the tools we have now through restructuring, improvements are in progress, but technology is the key to our very survival. There are problems we're facing now, to be sure, but we are getting there. Finally, let me, if I might, permit me to touch on a subject of concern and that one of my colleagues here mentioned. We need to recognize that underfunding state courts compounds other problems that already exist in the nation's justice systems. As with other states, we have seen a dramatic rise in the number of self-represented litigants. This is a complex issue, but some of the problem relates not only to the cost of litigation, but to the public perception of the cost of litigation. We have a healthy and collaborative bar in Vermont. It's not unified, but it is a partner more often than not with Supreme Court initiatives and that makes a tremendous contribution to representation of low-income litigants in the civil courts. In my own home county right now, Rutland County, a low-bono-pro-bono initiative has started and is having great success, but there's a limit to what we can ask and what the lawyers can do. The self-represented population in the courts puts great pressure on staff and the judge. It retards the pace of the process and it increases the risk of untoward results. More lawyers doing pro-bono work would help, but the trends do not favor that result. Students are graduating law school without jobs and oppressive debt. The vast majority of the bar is an asset to the legal system and volunteer time for the betterment of the courts, but lawyers and law firms focus more and more on the bottom line, as Tony Cronman described in his book now nearly 20 years ago. I'm hopeful that as a profession, from law schools to the practicing bar, we will begin to find a new paradigm, a new normal, just as Vermont has tried to pursue through court reform. Going back to the old days is not the solution, although the same ideals still hold true. At the Vermont Supreme Court, our approach has been to change our business model. Technology is how we believe we're going to advance on that in hand with the management flexibility that we now have. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chief Justice River. We are predictably a little bit behind the schedule that we set for ourselves, but we knew we were going to have this problem because we wanted to hear from as many people as possible. So I'm going to, and we do want to give our panel an opportunity to question this panel. And so we're just going to make a command decision and do that and we'll just eat. You guys are going to have to eat lunch more quickly when we get around to that. So, Dennis. Thank you very much for the presentations. As the states have cut your budgets as well as others around the country, and the courts adjusting to the budget cuts by being closed on business days, normal court business days, the layoffs of court personnel or actual termination because you cannot afford to keep them on, and the personnel that sets trial dates to give people an opportunity to be heard. Would you describe this as a crisis of the courts or would you describe this as a crisis of the justice system? Well, I think it's a crisis of the justice system. I think we're all partners in this, and I don't think you can separate the courts out from the other entities that make up the justice system. So I think that the ultimate constituent, the public is the one who suffers, but certainly there is at least in New York, and I'm sure in the other states, very much a common purpose with our partners in the justice system to make this work because I don't think we can do it in a vacuum. So I think it is a crisis in the justice system, and I even go further. I think certainly in terms of the states, it is a crisis in state government. There's not necessarily being addressed. I think it's a crisis of both. I think that the overarching justice system is certainly suffering, but in our day-to-day lives, when we're trying to make it all work, the practical sometimes takes precedence over the theoretical. Yes. You've identified a lot of problems and a lot of budget cuts, and that's going on around the country. However, taking it from the legislature's point of view in each state, the responses, we hear you, but everybody is suffering like that, and we're not just cutting you, we're cutting everybody because we just don't have the revenue that would provide for an adequate funding. What kind of... We know what the problem is. What kind of solutions can we propose to state legislatures? For example, in Florida, where I come from one of the proposals that eventually did not pass in the legislature was to implement a fixed percentage of the budget that would go to the judiciary every year. It was something like 2.25%. That eventually didn't work out. Even the courts didn't want it because depending on the year and the revenues, it may not be enough. But I think that in addition to identifying problems to the legislature, we need to also identify possible solutions or at least provide a framework for creating solutions together. What have you heard? What can we offer? The one thing that helped us this year is that the legislature actually recognized that the judicial branch is in the Constitution. That's a theme that could resonate in other places, I suppose. We didn't push it too hard, but we did thank them very much for noticing that. And in the budget process to tell the truth, as bad as it is, the New Hampshire Judicial Branch has done better than any other part of state government this year. And I think it's for that reason alone. You know, I think the answer is to some degree that you can't... I don't think we can fall into the trap of finding financial solutions for them that wind up what I talked about in the context of civil legal services being the judiciary as a pay-as-you-go operation. You know, when they start saying the only way the judiciary can meet its responsibilities is by filing fees and all this kind of thing, I think it really is a problem in terms of access to justice. So what the solution, I think, is to get across to them, yes, that we're a separate independent branch of government in the Constitution, and it's not a question of wanting to be treated differently than the other branches and everything else in state government. It's one of the consequences of treating us the same. And I think that's what we have to get across, that the distinctiveness of the judicial function and what the consequences of these across the board kinds of budget reductions. Can I just follow up on that? Last year, I guess, the New York Court of Appeals held in the context of the judicial salaries that the legislature was actually violating the separation of powers doctrine. Did that make you popular with them? And how has that been working out? Well, that's a good question. Let me say that since I was the plaintiff in that suit and you can't be the plaintiff and the judge in the same case, I was recused, I recused myself from the case, but what they did find is that it was unconstitutional for the legislature to link judicial salaries with other issues that had no relevance to the judiciary, whether it be the salaries of legislators or executive branch officials or issues like ethics reform or whatever else. What the court said, my colleague said, it's unconstitutional, stop doing that and we're not going to intrude into your branch of government, but the court told them you can't do that anymore and the end result, and I was directly attributable to the case, was the formation last year of a judicial salary compensation commission that went into effect this last April 1 and it's a commission that provides for judicial pay raises by operation of law unless they're abrogated by the legislature and the governor. And so the commission has not given its recommendations yet, it's really just in the formation stages, but whatever they recommend for raises for the judiciary over the next four years, each of the next four years will become law automatically unless abrogated and I am maybe confident it's too strong a word but I'm very hopeful and believe that there will be a major catch-up increase for judges in New York after 12 years without even a cost of living increase and after that hopefully cost of living increase at least to keep them current. So I think it's going to be worked out but it was an unbelievable situation when we talk about the separation of powers and an independent branch of government. I think we have time. Okay, one more. Yes. Please. It's all been very informative and provocative and coming from a large state with a large population, I wondered whether the chiefs in this region had explored any type of regional approach to efficiency and economy. We certainly have. The three northern New England states got together, started getting together when John was still chief and we have been talking and have been collaborating on jointly contracting for certain services, interpreters, things like that. I can't tell you exactly where that stands today but we certainly are paying attention to that. Part of the rationale behind that is it is incumbent upon us to do everything we can, this is my view, to make sure that we are using what funds we have as intelligently as possible as I guess I've said and I think it only behooves us to do that. I think we have an obligation and responsibility to do that so we are doing it. Our administrators are working on collaborative projects, not just interpreters but also the possibility of pooled purchasing and transcription and other things like that. I want to thank our panel. I know that our task force would like to keep you another couple of hours because there's so much we can learn and we want the American people to hear what you're telling us but we do have your written reports. We're not by any means done. We're going to keep after this. You'll probably be hearing from us again. Thank you so much for the time that you put into this.


It's time to get jazzed about the future of the .NET ecosystem. That's right, we're going to talk about .NET 5. It's hard to believe the .NET only came out in 2002. There are so many versions of the framework rapidly changing the places that a developer could create and support with C-Sharp. The entire ecosystem just turned 18, and it has been confusing at times when it comes to versioning. I fell in love with how powerful the .NET platform was, but I admit I felt a little torn about changing from a minor upgrade to the next iteration of the framework. How much actual value would I get from doing that upgrade? I am so pleased that .NET 5 Preview 2 is here today, and we can start playing with it. It gives us a hands-on look at why all C-Sharp developers should be a little excited about what's to come. There's one special thing in particular that I think we should all pay attention to. Unity. Now, I'm not talking about the Unity that's the gaming engine and not Unity, the inversion of controls or dependency injection. I'm talking about the Unity of all things .NET. Can you see how naming things is kind of difficult? Understanding what someone is talking about when they say .NET is a matter of context. Since the initial release of .NET Core in 2016, there has been a clarification required almost every time I say that I'm a .NET developer or I'm a C-Sharp developer. They ask which one? Where? On the desktop? In a browser? Back in an API somewhere? Which one are you? Many of the projects I've worked on in the past had a pretty reliable integration with .NET 4.5, for example. So, upending everything that I was doing to work with a completely different set of APIs with .NET Core was a little bit of a daunting task when it came to how much I was integrated. And to add to the value of whether or not I should change, the new versions of framework were still being released side by side with .NET Core all the way up until earlier in 2019. And then C-Sharp8 came out. We got noble reference types and a lot more, like default implementations. Along with a new version of the language that we all know and love came a caveat. C-Sharp8 was only officially supported alongside of .NET standard 2.1, which of course, the .NET framework would never support. There are some suggestions out there about how to kind of jerry-rig it. It will never completely work. And there's probably a lot of problems that will come along with trying to retrofit it to the rest of the .NET framework. C-Sharp8 support officially came out with the release of .NET Core 3. But of course, I wanted to play around with C-Sharp8. Lots of great things coming. Moving to the .NET Core environment suddenly required deeper conversations with my team about taking advantage of the benefits of C-Sharp8. In the meantime, new versions of .NET framework were still being shipped. And in fact, .NET 4.8 was released in 2019. Having a conversation with a client about why they should spend the money to move everything to a new runtime when their existing runtime was still shipping, the latest versions of it was a bit challenging to say the least. Wouldn't it be nice to have one .NET to rule them all? Luckily, Microsoft agreed. Here is the umbrella of .NET 5 to the rescue. As the first part of this unification scheme, Microsoft's Xamarin Mobile Development will switch from using MonoBCL over to what all the other components are using, which is known as the .NET Core BCL. And with that move, Xamarin Development will officially be just folded into .NET 5. That means, for the first time, one BCL-based framework will handle all of the app models, such as ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, Blazor, WinForms, WPF, Xamarin, and ML.NET, or MachineLearning.NET. Wait, WPF and WinForms made it in to the latest version of .NET? Yes, it's true. .NET 5 is happy to see them included in this runtime. Getting started working with the preview version of .NET 5 is what we here at Okta have been actively playing with and encourage all C-Sharp developers to try the same. According to the roadmap, .NET Core has been rebranded and folded into .NET 5 going forward. So there's one major version number incremented every year. Because .NET Framework was already on version 4x, it didn't really make sense to name it .NET Core 4. There would be a lot more confusion, especially since there's the unification of just one platform. So jumping to 5 would unify the name of that ecosystem going forward. So does that mean that this is the end of life for the existing .NET Framework? Well, no, not exactly. According to Scott Hunter, the traditional platform will still be supported at least for a while. The official support policy for .NET is stated directly on Microsoft's website alongside of the .NET Core previous version support in case you are curious about a particular version sunsetting. This does mean that the current .NET 4.8 will not evolve, but some security patches will be available for it in the future. Great, so how do we prepare our existing apps for the future of .NET? Remember, right now .NET 5 is still in preview. Until general release, the best way to get prepared is to migrate your existing .NET Framework apps to .NET Core 3.1, particularly if you want solid general availability for things like Blazor and of course, T-Sharp 8. Now, breaking changes are possible with any major release, but the majority of the APIs should remain the same in place from .NET Core 3.x. Make sure you move your class libraries to .NET standard 2.1, if possible, to help future-proof your transition. When it comes to Xamarin, the compiler will move from the monobcl base class library to the .NET Core BCL. More on mobile app migrations in a future video. So what does this all mean? The .NET 5 ecosystem to me is still based on previous versions of .NET Core, which at first was very light and didn't have all of the libraries that I needed, but has since really caught up to the times. It's also the next logical iteration with a dash of WinForms and WPF included. Faster algorithms and a bit of rebranding. That's something I can get behind. What do you think about the future of this platform? Leave a comment below and share what project you're working on, which version of .NET it is, and what you're looking forward to, or at least wondering about when it comes to .NET 5. Don't forget to like and subscribe. We've got lots of videos coming to you from Okta. Long live .NET.