Today we have several releases to talk about: there’s the release of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, the release of .NET Core 2.0, and a release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1. We’ll talk about them briefly in that order, but as always, there’s a lot more information in the release notes for each product. If you’d like to jump right in, download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, download .NET Core 2.0, and download Visual Studio for Mac.

The long-term-support (LTS) version 3.1 of Microsoft .NET Core Framework is slated to go out of support on December 13th, 2022. Microsoft recommends upgrading .NET Core 3.1 applications to .NET 6.0 to stay supported for the future, while the developers have mixed feelings about the .NET support policy.

.NET Core May 2020 Updates – 2.1.18 and 3.1.4 

.NET Core 3.1.4 and .NET Core SDK ( Download | Release Notes  

.NET Core 2.1.18 and .NET Core SDK ( Download  | Release Notes  

You may have noticed it already, but when you create a console application with Visual Studio 2019, the default runtime is not .NET 5 but .NET Core 3.1! Why ? Because .NET 5 is not LTS and therefore Microsoft has intentionally chosen to offer the latest LTS version of .NET by default, ie .NET Core 3.1. 

These are the customer-reported issues addressed in 15.8.3:

• Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8.2 contained a pre-release build of .NET Core SDK 2.1.401 that is incompatible with Visual Studio. We have corrected this issue with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8.3.
• VSCppUnit test case creation failure.
• Python IntelliSense not working on Python 2.7.
• XAML designer causing Visual Studio to close unexpectedly. 

Preview: The SQLite Llibrary as a .NET assembly
The latest pre-release of SQLitePCLRaw contains a new bundle package called SQLitePCLRaw.bundle_cil. This package is like SQLitePCLRaw's other "bundle" packages except that it involves no P/Invoke and no platform-specific shared libraries. Instead, bundle_cil provides the SQLite library as a pure .NET assembly which was compiled by Llama. 

SQL Server 2022 Performance - Buffer Pool Scan 

Considering the significant performance improvements and the elimination of buffer pool scan issues in SQL Server 2022, upgrading your SQL Server environment to this latest version is highly recommended. 

e are very pleased to announce the availability of ASP.NET Core RC2.  This release succeeds the ASP.NET 5 RC1 release and features a number of updates to enhance compatibility with other .NET frameworks and an improved runtime.  

.NET 8 Preview 5 Combines Upcoming Blazor Changes in Handy New Project Template  

ASP.NET Core Dev Team Launches 'Blazor United' Push for .NET 8