.NET 8 Preview 3 is now available. It includes changes to build paths, workloads, Microsoft.Extensions, and containers. It also includes performance improvements in the JIT, for Arm64, and dynamic PGO. If you missed the March preview, you may want to read the Preview 2 post. 

Microsoft's second preview of .NET 8 is just "a quick follow-up" to Preview 1, highlighted by a couple of improvements to Blazor, for creating web apps in C# instead of JavaScript.

.NET Conf 2023 - Celebrating the Release of .NET 8! - Save the Date! 

What's On Tap for .NET 8 (Preview 1 Coming this Month) 

The latest update for Visual Studio 2022 is officially out. Offering a comprehensive suite of enhancements that span productivity, programming languages, and enterprise management, this general release is a monumental step forward. Developed with extensive user feedback, this version is fully compatible with .NET 8, which is also generally available as of today. 

We are happy to announce the availability of .NET 8, the latest LTS version of one of the world’s leading development platforms, starting today. .NET 8 delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements, as well as platform and tooling enhancements that help increase developer productivity and speed of innovation 

As we come to towards the end of 2023, we are excited to announce the general availability of PowerShell 7.4! This release is built on .NET 8 and similarly, is our latest Long Term Support (LTS) release supported for 3 years. 

• Enhanced C# support: enjoy better C# 8.0 support, and apply the Convert concatenation to interpolation context action in scope. 

Added initial support for C# 8. 

EF Core 8, or just EF8, is the successor to EF Core 7. EF8 requires .NET 8. It will not work with .NET 6 or 7, or with any version of .NET Framework.