Entity Framework half-heartedly supported Domain-Driven Design patterns. But the new-from-scratch EF Core has brought new hope for developers to map your well-designed domain classes to a database, reducing the cases where a separate data model is needed. EF Core 2.1 is very DDD friendly, even supporting things like fully encapsulated collections, backing fields and the return of support for value objects. In this session, we'll review some well-designed aggregates and explore how far EF Core 2.1 goes to act as the mapper between your domain classes and your data store. 

New platform and feature support

• Support for SQL 2019
• Support for Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Azure SQL Database support
  • SLO/Edition
  • Support for updated Azure SQL SKUs
• Support for Always Encrypted with secure enclaves
• UTF-8 support on collation dialog 

• .NET Core is the future of .NET: If you’ve already started working with .NET Core, that’s great! If you’re starting a new project, you should consider .NET Core.
• .NET Framework will continue to be supported: If you have any existing applications on .NET Framework (Windows-only), you can keep those on .NET Framework.
• .NET Releases will become more predictable: Starting with .NET 5.0, there will be 1 major release every year,  after which each even-numbered release (6.0, 8.0, etc) will come with LTS (Long-Term Support). 

We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.0. It includes many improvements, including adding Windows Forms and WPF, adding new JSON APIs, support for ARM64 and improving performance across the board. C# 8 is also part of this release, which includes nullable, async streams, and more patterns. F# 4.7 is included, and focused on relaxing syntax and targeting .NET Standard 2.0. You can start updating existing projects to target .NET Core 3.0 today. The release is compatible with previous versions, making updating easy. 

.NET Core 3 will be supported in Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 was released last week and has support for C# 8. The Visual Studio Code C# Extension (in pre-release channel) was also just updated to support C# 8. 

Today, the Entity Framework Core team announces the eighth and final preview release of EF Core 5.0. The next release will be a release candidate (RC). This release includes table-per-type (TPT) mapping, table-valued functions, SQLite table rebuilds for migrations and much more. 

The Internals of PostgreSQL
for database administrators and system developers 

You can download .NET 6 Preview 1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• Installers and binaries
• Container images
• Linux packages
• Release notes
• Known issues
• GitHub issue tracker

.NET 6 has been tested with Visual Studio 16.9 Preview 4 and Visual Studio for Mac 8.9. We recommend you use those builds if you want to try .NET 6. 

For .NET 6, we have made FileStream much faster and more reliable, thanks to an almost entire re-write. For same cases, the async implementation is now a few times faster!