In .NET 6 (preview 4), two long-awaited types have been introduced as part of the core library. DateOnly and TimeOnly allow developers to represent either the date or time portion of a DateTime. These two new types are structs (value types) and may be used when your code deals with date or time concepts independently. Both types can be found in the System namespace. Using these new types may align well with how databases allow similar data to be represented. Specifically, these types align well with the SQL Server date and time data types. 

Support for the .NET 6 SDK, including Hot Reload  

With .NET 6 previews starting right around the corner, it is time to start getting excited for the new .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) that was announced at BUILD 2020. This year of .NET has a lot of amazing things for client application developers. Let’s review the highlights and set your expectations for the year ahead. 

New In-Memory OLTP improvements in CTP3.1 include:

• Unique indexes in memory-optimized tables, to complement the support for unique constraints that was released in CTP3
• LOB data types varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max) in memory-optimized tables and natively compiled modules
• Indexes with NULLable key columns in memory-optimized tables

Syntax inputdate AT TIME ZONE timezone.

• Inputdate: An expression that can be resolved to a smalldatetime, datetime, datetime2, or datetimeoffset value.
• Timezone: Name of the destination time zone in standard format as enumerated by Windows. Available time zones can be found by querying sys.time_zone_info.
  

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) updates allow upgrading your existing models to 1200 compatibility level and a JSON editor for SSDT;

Here’s what’s new in this preview release:

• .NET Hot Reload updates for dotnet watch
• ASP.NET Core SPA templates updated to Angular 11 and React 17
• Use Razor syntax in SVG foreignObject elements
• Specify null for Action and RenderFragment component parameters
• Reduced Blazor WebAssembly download size with runtime relinking
• Configurable buffer threshold before writing to disk in Json.NET output formatter
• Subcategories for better filtering of Kestrel logs
• Faster get and set for HTTP headers
• Configurable unconsumed incoming buffer size for IIS 

Preview 6 is the second to last preview before we enter the RC period. There will be two RCs. This release itself is relatively small, while Preview 7 will be bigger.  

We are excited to release .NET 6 Release Candidate 2. It is the second of two “go live” release candidate releases that are supported in production. For the last couple months, the team has been focused exclusively on quality improvements. There are a lot of new features in the release, which only fully come together near the end. The team is currently validating end-to-end workflows to find the places where design intentions and technical reality don’t yet fully match. That’s led to teams tightening leaky pipes and paving paths all the way to their destination. 

JSON support has only been introduced in MySQL 5.7.8, but it is undoubtedly the feature that arouses most enthusiasm among MySQL users.