There are two MySQL providers for Entity Framework Core:
- The official one from MySQL: MySql.Data.EntityFrameworkCore. As of now, the latest version is 8.0.19, and works with Entity Framework Core 2.1 (and probably also 2.2). Since EF Core 3.0 is a major version with breaking changes, you cannot use it with this provider.
- The Pomelo provider: Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql. There is a 3.1 version of this provider.
In other words, if you want to use EF Core 3.0/3.1 with MySQL, at this point you need to use the Pomelo provider (or wait for the official MySQL one to get released).

Visual Studio Code, ever growing in popularity and flexibility, has been named by Google as a first-class code editor for working with the company's Flutter SDK and Dart programming language for mobile development.  

Ready to get started with Visual Studio 2017? This is your course! Join the experts and get the details, from installation to debugging, in this practical Visual Studio 2017 deep dive.

See how to download and install Visual Studio in standalone and networked environments, along with some of the configuration options, such as choosing your workloads (types of apps or services, languages, and platforms), customizing the installation, and installing language packs. Then, take a tour of the Visual Studio IDE, including all the basics you need to get started with your development projects. Finally, explore debugging in Visual Studio, and learn how to use its features to investigate problems in your code.

Moq is a mocking library for .NET Unit Testing (cue the TDD folks reminding us mocks are unnecessary), and it is by far the most widely used mocking library in .NET (475 million downloads vs 87 million for the next largest, NSubstitute). Yesterday, its author released version 4.20.1; which added nagware and a backdoor to Moq, in a bid to drive up paid usages of Moq through ‘Sponsorships’. 

Blazor Hybrid for Beginners
Join James Montemagno as he takes you on a journey of building your first Hybrid applications across iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Web with ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Blazor Hybrid, and .NET MAUI!  You will learn how to use Blazor Hybrid to blend desktop and mobile native client frameworks with .NET and Blazor.
In a Blazor Hybrid app, Razor components run natively on the device. Components render to an embedded Web View control through a local interop channel. Components don't run in the browser, and WebAssembly isn't involved. Razor components load and execute code quickly, and components have full access to the native capabilities of the device through the .NET platform. Component styles rendered in a Web View are platform dependent and may require you to account for rendering differences across platforms using custom stylesheets.
Blazor Hybrid support is built into the .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) framework. .NET MAUI includes the BlazorWebView control that permits rendering Razor components into an embedded Web View. By using .NET MAUI and Blazor together, you can reuse one set of web UI components across mobile, desktop, and web.
 

We developers spend lot of our time reading code. We read code so that we know how to change it to implement a new feature, fix a bug, etc. It is much better to work in a code base where code is easy to read and understand.

One thing that can make code readable is good naming. Giving variables, classes, and methods good names makes code easier to read. 

.NET 8 Preview 1 is now available! This is the first preview of the next major version of .NET, which will include the next wave of innovations for web development with ASP.NET Core.

In .NET 8 we plan to make broad investments across ASP.NET Core. Below are some of the areas we plan to focus on: 

One of the more awesome things I like about being a .NET developer is LINQ. LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a fluent query interface implemented in the .NET framework. It helps you query, sort and order any type of collection. This is a very neat way of querying arrays, lists, dictionaries, objects, etc. I’ve made 5 examples which run out of the box with Node.js (or io.js). You can also use the library for browser based JavaScript projects.

• Linux support for tier-1, mission-critical workloads – SQL Server 2017 support for Linux includes the same high availability solutions on Linux as Windows Server, including Always On availability groups integrated with Linux native clustering solutions like Pacemaker.
• Graph data processing in SQL Server – With the graph data features available in SQL Server 2017and Azure SQL Database, customers can create nodes and edges, and discover complex and many-to-many relationships.
• Adaptive query processing – Adaptive query processing is a family of features in SQL Server 2017 that automatically keeps database queries running as efficiently as possible without requiring additional tuning from database administrators. In addition to the capability to adjust batch mode memory grants, the feature set includes batch mode adaptive joins and interleaved execution capabilities.
• Python integration for advanced analytics – Microsoft Machine Learning Services now brings you the ability to run in-database analytics using Python or R in a parallelized and scalable way. The ability to run advanced analytics in your operational store without ETL means faster time to insights for customers while easy deployment and rich extensibility make it fast to get up and running on the right model.