Preview 3 of .NET 8 includes a new project templates to create an API with a TODO service instead of the weather forecast . Looking into the generated code of this template, there are a lot more changes going on such as a slim builder and using a JSON source generator which helps when using AOT to create native .NET binaries. This article looks into the changes coming. 

ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 is your complete solution for modern web development. It handles all of your web development needs from the frontend to the backend. You can build beautiful, richly interactive web experiences with Blazor, and high-performance backend APIs and services that are reliable and secure. ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 is perfect for building cloud-native apps, and great tooling in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code supercharges your productivity. With ASP.NET Core in .NET 8, every developer is a full stack developer! 

  The "Blazor United" effort is really a collection of features we're adding to Blazor so that you can get the best of server & client based web development. These features include: Server-side rendering, streaming rendering, enhanced navigations & form handling, add client interactivity per page or component, and determining the client render mode at runtime. We've started delivering server-side rendering support for Blazor with .NET 8 Preview 3, which is now available to try out. We plan to deliver the remaining features in upcoming previews. We hope to deliver them all for .NET 8, but we'll see how far we get. 

an exciting release incorporated with plenty of library updates, a new WASM mode, more source generators, constant performance improvements, and NativeAOT support on iOS. We hope you enjoy these new features and improvements. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our journey of making .NET better, together! 

EF Core 8, or just EF8, is the successor to EF Core 7. EF8 requires .NET 8. It will not work with .NET 6 or 7, or with any version of .NET Framework. 

The .NET SDK 5.0.300 release is available for download. The latest 5.0 release is always listed at .NET 5.0 Releases.

Downloads

	SDK Installer1	SDK Binaries1	Runtime Installer	Runtime Binaries	ASP.NET Core Runtime	Windows Desktop Runtime
Windows	x86 | x64 | Arm64	x86 | x64 | Arm64	x86 | x64 | Arm64	x86 | x64 | Arm64	x86 | x64 | Hosting Bundle 2	x86 | x64
macOS	x64	x64	x64	x64	x64	-
Linux	Snap and Package Manager	x64 | Arm | Arm64 | x64 Alpine	Packages (x64)	x64 | Arm | Arm64 | Arm64 Alpine | x64 Alpine	x64 1 | Arm 1 | Arm64 1 | x64 Alpine	-
	Checksums	Checksums	Checksums	Checksums	Checksums	Checksums

The .NET 7.0.201 release is available for download. This SDK includes the previously released .NET 7.0.3 Runtime and is in support of Visual Studio 17.5 release.  

Microsoft's second preview of .NET 8 is just "a quick follow-up" to Preview 1, highlighted by a couple of improvements to Blazor, for creating web apps in C# instead of JavaScript.

In this C# 8 tutorial, I am going to introduce a selection of currently planned features which will most probably end up in the final release. All of the C# 8 features are still early in development and are likely to change. 

Here are some of the reasons why nullable reference types are less than ideal:

• Invoking a member on a null value will issue a System.NullReferenceException exception, and every invocation that results in a System.NullReferenceException in production code is a bug. Unfortunately, however, with nullable reference types we “fall in” to doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing. The “fall in” action is to invoke a reference type without checking for null.
• There’s an inconsistency between reference types and value types (following the introduction of Nullable<T>) in that value types are nullable when decorated with  “?” (for example, int? number); otherwise, they default to non-nullable. In contrast, reference types are nullable by default. This is “normal” to those of us who have been programming in C# for a long time, but if we could do it all over, we’d want the default for reference types to be non-nullable and the addition of a “?” to be an explicit way to allow nulls.
• It’s not possible to run static flow analysis to check all paths regarding whether a value will be null before dereferencing it, or not. Consider, for example, if there were unmanaged code invocations, multi-threading, or null assignment/­replacement based on runtime conditions. (Not to mention whether analysis would include checking of all library APIs that are invoked.)
• There’s no reasonable syntax to indicate that a reference type value of null is invalid for a particular declaration.
• There’s no way to decorate parameters to not allow null.