Welcome to .NET 8! The first preview is ready for you to download: claim your copy of the first .NET 8 preview and start building applications today. Scroll down to see the list of features included in this preview. .NET 8 is a long-term support (LTS) release. This blog post covers the major themes and goals that drive the prioritization and selection of enhancements to develop. .NET 8 preview and release candidate builds will be delivered monthly. As usual, the final release will be delivered sometime in November at .NET Conf. 

A Tour of Go (golang) for the C# Developer

Learning other programming languages enhances our work in our primary language. From the perspective of a C# developer, the Go language (golang) has many interesting ideas. Go is opinionated on some things (such as where curly braces go and what items are capitalized). Declaring an unused variable causes a compile failure; the use of "blank identifiers" (or "discards" in C#) are common. Concurrency is baked right in to the language through goroutines and channels. Programming by exception is discouraged; it's actually called a "panic" in Go. Instead, errors are treated as states to be handled like any other data state. We'll explore these features (and others) by building an application that uses concurrent operations to get data from a service. These ideas make us think about the way we program and how we can improve our day-to-day work (in C# or elsewhere).

0:00 Welcome to Go
2:40 Step 1: Basics
12:20 Step 2: Calling a web service
23:35 Step 3: Parsing JSON
36:26 Step 4: "for" loops
41:00 Step 5: Interfaces and methods
50:05 Step 6: Time and Args
55:10 Step 7: Concurrency
1:07:10 Step 8: Errors
1:14:40 Step 9: Concurrency and errors
1:24:35 Where to go next 

To reduce allocations and memory usage when serializing Json.NET 8.0 adds a new IArrayPool interface. Json.NET is already very lean when it comes to allocations, working with raw characters on array buffers instead of allocated strings, but those buffers can easily grow large, and a new buffer is created each time JSON is read or written. IArrayPool allows array buffers to be reused, similar to connection pooling with a database, or thread pooling in .NET. 

The note-taking app for programmers  that focuses on markdown, snippets, and customizability

PowerShell 7.3 is built on top of .NET 7 and as a non-LTS (Long Term Support) release will be supported for 18 months. PowerShell 7.2 is still the current LTS (3-year supported) release of PowerShell. 

The next version of npm, v7, has been completed and will be shipping with Node.js v15 this week. The new release adds several features requested by developers including support for Workspaces. 

net5.0. This is for code that runs everywhere. It combines and replaces the netcoreapp and netstandard names. This TFM will generally only include technologies that work cross-platform (except for pragmatic concessions, like we already did in .NET Standard).