As software creation processes continue to become more complicated, development teams are taking a more all-encompassing approach that involves agile testing methodologies. Like agile software development, agile testing involves running test cases that assess the overall integrity of a solution, rather than simply ensuring that each part and piece are technically sound. Viewed as an analogy, agile testing methodologies ensure that software is a well-oiled machine, whereas a linear approach to testing just ensures that each of the gears is in good order. Herein lies the difference between unit tests and test automation. 

The main theme for this ASP.NET Core release was to improve developer productivity and platform functionality with regard to building Web/HTTP APIs. As usual, we made some performance improvements as well.  

In this release we have enabled animations and view transformations, completed the porting of several UI components, and introduced improvements to the single project templates. 

The key highlights to cover this month include:

• Announcing the Schema Compare extension
• Changed location of tasks view
• Added welcome page
• Notebook improvements
• Bug fixes 

A couple of notable additions to try:

• Multi-caret editing improvements
• Faster git branch switching
• Faster unit test execution
• TypeScript 3.0 support