λ# — v0.5 Release Notes

It’s been a while as we’ve been busy getting v0.5 ready. I can honestly say this is the best tool for doing Serverless .NET on AWS! It builds on the official AWS .NET toolkit and adds some welcome features to it.

Quick reminder: λ# is a CLI and SDK for rapid serverless application development on AWS using CloudFormation.

With λ# v0.5 being GA, the recommended way to install it is as a dotnet global tool from nuget*:

dotnet tool install -g LambdaSharp.Tool

Following are some highlights, but I recommend checking out the release notes to learn about all the changes and new features in this huge release.

• λ# CLI is now a full fledged, validating compiler for CloudFormation. Invalid references to AWS resource attributes or misspelled property names are now caught during the build phase, saving valuable time. This capability also applies to custom resource types defined in other λ# modules.
• λ# finalizers are CloudFormation constructor and destructor functions, which run after a CloudFormation stack is created or updated, and before it is destroyed. λ# finalizers are great for initializing and upgrading data sets, as well as destroying dynamically created resources.
• λ# modules can now decrypt CloudFormation parameters during deployment. This makes it finally trivial to work with encrypted values, such as API tokens and passwords, which are sometimes required to initialize AWS resources.
• Finally, λ# CLI now automatically discovers and deploys dependent λ# modules. In addition, it uses an interactive shell to prompt for missing parameters, making it much easier to get a CloudFormation stack up and running in no time.

With v0.5 out, the focus is now incremental improvements. Please reach out to us on Twitter @lambdasharp or file any issues on GitHub.

Happy hacking!