Today, we are glad to release .NET 6 Preview 2. It includes new APIs, runtime performance improvements, and early builds of .NET MAUI. It also includes builds for Apple Silicon, which were missing for Preview 1. 

Those of you who worked with ASP.NET web forms will recollect that certain server controls such as DropDownList have a property called AutoPostBack. This property when set to true automatically submits the form to the server whenever the selection changes and raises some server side event. In modern web development people prefer to use Ajax over AutoPostBack but at times AutoPostBack is what you might need. To that end this article shows how AutoPostBack can be implemented in ASP.NET Core applications. 

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

• Improved Blazor accessibility
• Required Blazor component parameters
• Efficient byte array transfers for JavaScript interop
• Optional parameters for view component tag helpers
• Angular template updated to Angular 12
• OpenAPI support for minimal APIs
• Inject services into minimal APIs without [FromServices] attribute
• Configure the accept socket for Kestrel
• IHttpActivityFeature
• Long running activity tag for SignalR connections
• WebSocket compression
• SignalR WebSockets TestServer support
• New OnCheckSlidingExpiration event for controlling cookie renewal
• ClientCertificateMode.DelayCertificate 

Mercury is currently 99.9% compatible with Visual Basic.NET, and already adds a wide range of language extensions and support for C# 9.0 features that will make the VB developers lives easier. The extras include support for pointers and unsafe code, lazy properties, and C# 9's new records. 

What’s new for performance in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 3.0 – Ben Adams
One of the biggest advantages of using .NET Core (besides cross-platform support) is the drastic improvements in performance. Because the .NET Core team was able to make minor breaking changes in the runtime and Base Class Library (BCL), lots of stuff was implemented much more efficiently. In this session Ben will dive into the performance improvements in .NET Core in the 3.0 release: runtime changes, JIT changes, intrinsics and a deep dive into some of the improvements making it the best release yet!

The PowerUpSQL module includes functions that support SQL Server discovery, auditing for common weak configurations, and privilege escalation on scale.  

new package validation tooling that will become available with .NET 6. 

MySQL Connector/Net 7.0.4 is the first development release that expands
cross-platform support to Linux and OS X when using Microsoft's .NET Core
framework. 

Migration to ASP.NET Core in .NET 6

WebApplication and WebApplicationBuilder
Differences in the hosting model
Building libraries for ASP.NET Core
FAQ
Cheatsheet
 

The fourth preview of Entity Framework Core (EF Core) 8 is available on NuGet today!

Basic information

EF Core 8, or just EF8, is the successor to EF Core 7, and is scheduled for release in November 2023, at the same time as .NET 8.

EF8 previews currently target .NET 6, and can therefore be used with either .NET 6 (LTS) or .NET 7. This will likely be updated to .NET 8 as we near release.

EF8 will align with .NET 8 as a long-term support (LTS) release. See the .NET support policy for more information.