Use of the library does involve having an Apple Developer account at $99 a year , and to use the beta, developers will need to set up core Maps identifiers, keys, and tokens via their developer account. The beta version limits usage to  250,000 instantiations and 25,000 service calls, per API key per day, compared to Google's limit of 100,000 map instantiations per month on the free tier. 

<LangVersion>9.0</LangVersion>

// Licensed to the .NET Foundation under one or more agreements.
// The .NET Foundation licenses this file to you under the MIT license.

using System.ComponentModel;

namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices
{
   /// <summary>
   /// Reserved to be used by the compiler for tracking metadata.
   /// This class should not be used by developers in source code.
   /// </summary>
   [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)]
   internal static class IsExternalInit
   {
   }
}

Always Encrypted is a new feature in SQL Server 2016, which encrypts the data both at rest *and* in motion (and keeps it encrypted in memory). So this protects the data from rogue administrators, backup thieves, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Unlike TDE, as well, Always Encrypted allows you to encrypt only certain columns, rather than the entire database.

Here are some of the reasons why nullable reference types are less than ideal:

• Invoking a member on a null value will issue a System.NullReferenceException exception, and every invocation that results in a System.NullReferenceException in production code is a bug. Unfortunately, however, with nullable reference types we “fall in” to doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing. The “fall in” action is to invoke a reference type without checking for null.
• There’s an inconsistency between reference types and value types (following the introduction of Nullable<T>) in that value types are nullable when decorated with  “?” (for example, int? number); otherwise, they default to non-nullable. In contrast, reference types are nullable by default. This is “normal” to those of us who have been programming in C# for a long time, but if we could do it all over, we’d want the default for reference types to be non-nullable and the addition of a “?” to be an explicit way to allow nulls.
• It’s not possible to run static flow analysis to check all paths regarding whether a value will be null before dereferencing it, or not. Consider, for example, if there were unmanaged code invocations, multi-threading, or null assignment/­replacement based on runtime conditions. (Not to mention whether analysis would include checking of all library APIs that are invoked.)
• There’s no reasonable syntax to indicate that a reference type value of null is invalid for a particular declaration.
• There’s no way to decorate parameters to not allow null. 

MembershipReboot is a user identity management and authentication library. It has nothing to do with the ASP.NET Membership Provider, but was inspired by it due to frustrations with the built-in ASP.NET Membership system. The goals are to improve upon and provide missing features from ASP.NET Membership. It is designed to encapsulate the important security logic while leaving most of the other aspects of account management either configurable or extensible for application developers to customize as needed. 

As anyone in the .NET community who hasn't been living under a rock will know, there's a lot of exciting things happening with .NET at the moment with the announcement of the open source, cross platform, .NET Core. However, partly due to the very open nature of its evolution, there's been a whole host of names associated with its development - vNext, ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET Core, .NET generations etc.

In this post I'm going to try and clarify some of the naming and terminology surrounding the evolution of the .NET framework. I'll discuss some of the challenges the latest iteration is attempting to deal with and how the latest developments aim to address these.

This is really for those that have seen some of the big announcements but aren't sure about the intricacies of this new framework and how it relates to the existing ecosystem, which was my situation before I really started digging into it all properly!

Hopefully by the end of this article you'll have a clearer grasp of the latest in .NET! 

The survey will close at the end of April, with the results written up shortly after. If you’d like to know when this happens, follow me on Twitter or leave your email at the end of the survey. You’ll then receive a link to the results articles once they are published.