Here’s the list of what’s new in this preview:

• Razor Components renamed back to server-side Blazor
• Client-side Blazor on WebAssembly now in official preview
• Resolve components based on @using
• _Imports.razor
• New component item template
• Reconnection to the same server
• Stateful reconnection after prerendering
• Render stateful interactive components from Razor pages and views
• Detect when the app is prerendering
• Configure the SignalR client for server-side Blazor apps
• Improved SignalR reconnect features
• Configure SignalR client for server-side Blazor apps
• Additional options for MVC service registration
• Endpoint routing updates
• New template for gRPC
• Design-time build for gRPC
• New Worker SDK 

You might think, as a developer, that nothing but the best is good enough as a development database. You might be mistaken. There is a lot to be said for LocalDB, but Ed Elliott argues that every edition has its pros and cons, and you need to consider Cloud-based resources, VMs and Containerised databases too. There is a whole range of alternatives and how you choose depends on the type of database you are developing, but for Ed, LocalDB gets the five-star accolade
 

A new version has been released! This adds better support for GitLab shorthands via an update to hosted-git-info, and better error handling and reporting when users encounter EACCES on their cache folder.

To get it, run:

npm install -g npm 

Attempting to install or uninstall results in the error "Cannot create a file when that file already exists.”
For some reason, Visual Studio extensions can get in a weird state where you've uninstalled the VSIX extension, but some files were left behind. To work around this issue:

1. Exit Visual Studio
2. Open the following folder (it might be on a different drive on your machine)
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft Corporation\NuGet Package Manager\<version>\
3. Delete all the files with the .deleteme extensions.
4. Re-open Visual Studio
After following these steps, you should be able to continue.

You can download 5.0.2 , 3.1.11, 2.1.24 versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux, for x86, x64, Arm32, and Arm64. 

Angular CLI 1.1 is out and here are some notable new features:

• outputs smaller and faster bundles by default,
• now comes with a new welcome screen when creating a new application,
• has better support for serving with a different public URL, and
• now supports fixing generated code according to your linting preferences, e.g. use double-quotes instead of single quotes for strings.

Along with over 50 fixes! 

Stairway to XML

XML has been part of the SQL Standard since 2003, and is essential for any DBA because so many of the dynamic management views return XML data. Now that the industry is more used to data defined by document markup, it is becoming more important than ever for Database Developers and DBAs to understand the technology and to know where it makes sense to use XML. In this book, originally a series of articles on SQLServerCentral.com, Robert Sheldon flexes his talent to make the complicated seem simple. 

Spark is an open source computing framework for Big Data, and it’s becoming increasingly popular, especially in machine learning scenarios. In this article I’ll describe how to install Spark on a machine running a Windows OS, and explain basic Spark functionality from a .NET developer’s point of view.