.NET 8 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available and includes many great new improvements to ASP.NET Core!

This is the last release candidate that we plan to share before the final .NET 8 release later this year. Most of the planned features and changes for .NET 8 are part of this release candidate and are ready for you to try out. You can find the full list of what’s new in ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 in the docs. 

Irresponsible ownership of data is the cause of many leaked emails, data, and other damaging information. Securing a user’s personal information is the job of software developers. If you, as a developer, can decrypt the information stored in the database of the system you are working on, then so can anyone else. In Cryptography in .NET Succinctly, Dirk Strauss will take readers through generating cryptographic signatures, hashing and salting passwords, and when and how to use symmetric vs. asymmetric encryption. 

Now you can upgrade any .NET application to the latest version of .NET inside of Visual Studio! We are happy to introduce it as a Visual Studio extension and will upgrade your .NET Framework or .NET Core web- and desktop apps. In this video, Olia shows you how to get the extension and start to update your projects to the latest version of NET in minutes. 

Demonstrate how ASP.NET Core works deep (sometimes very deep) under the hood. In this series I will be studying the guts of MVC. 

This ebook is no fluff–just a developer-to-developer breakdown of what’s in store for .NET in 2015. Included are code snippets and step-by-step tutorials on handy new features and techniques.  

• Added support for .NET 6.0. #1704
• Added support for DateOnly and TimeOnly for SqlParameter value and GetFieldValue. #1813
• Added support for TLS 1.3 on .NET Core and native SNI. #1821
• Added ServerCertificate setting for Encrypt=Mandatory or Encrypt=Strict. #1822 Read more
• Added Windows ARM64 support when targeting .NET Framework. #1828  

C# Beginners Course
This school year, I give a course for young students at the beginning of their programming careers. They have no or very limited prior knowledge regarding coding. Therefore, we start at the very beginning and learn software development fundamentals using C# and .NET. 

PostSharp 6.0 is the biggest refactoring since the 2.0 version released in July 2010. For a good cause: PostSharp 6.0 now runs natively in .NET Core 2.0. Previous versions of PostSharp executed only under .NET Framework at build time and the support for .NET Core was achieved by using a load of hacks that ended up being unmaintainable, warranting this big refactoring.

Let’s have a look at the new features of PostSharp 6.0 :

• Support for .NET Core 2.0-2.1 and .NET Standard 2.0.
• Support for Portable PDB.
• Support for C# 7.2.
• Ending the PostSharp versioning hell side-by-side: backward compatibility within the same major version.
• Logging: robustness to faults in the logging subsystem.
• Logging: no need to initialize before the first logged method is hit.
• Caching: preventing concurrent execution (locking).
• Visual Studio tooling: support for the new CPS-based project systems.
• GDPR compliance: we no longer collect your name and email for trial, nor use unsecure HTTP, nor use non-resettable user id hashes. 

Rust – the Ultimate Programming Language?

What makes a good programming language? Syntax? Compiler? Tools and ecosystem? It is tempting to say “all of that” but in that case, why there are so many different programming languages? All these components are very important but they alone can’t make the language “good”. One of essential things is the purpose — like languages for rapid development, or development of distributed algorithms, or general purpose for high-level and low-level applications, or easy to learn, or safe to use and so on.

Dark Mode in 3 Lines of CSS and Other Adventures