Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Azure Active Directory authentication with Microsoft.Identity.Web
• CSS isolation for Blazor components
• Lazy loading in Blazor WebAssembly
• Updated Blazor WebAssembly globalization support
• New InputRadio Blazor component
• Set UI focus in Blazor apps
• Influencing the HTML head in Blazor apps
• IAsyncDisposable for Blazor components
• Control Blazor component instantiation
• Protected browser storage
• Model binding and validation with C# 9 record types
• Improvements to DynamicRouteValueTransformer 
• Auto refresh with dotnet watch 
• Console Logger Formatter
• JSON Console Logger 

Continuing our series on the over 100 API changes in .NET 6, we look at extensions to the LINQ library. 

We are happy to announce that we are open sourcing (#2553) native components in WPF – wpfgfx_cor3.dll and penimc_cor3.dll. With this, we have completed all planned open-sourcing work for WPF on .NET Core. 

In the past we've thought about records as a feature to enable working with data. "Working with data" is a big group with a number of facets, so it may be interesting to look at each in isolation. Let's start by looking at an example of records today and some of its drawbacks. 

Entity Framework (EF) Core is the rearchitected and rewritten version of the Entity Framework object relational mapping engine for .NET Core applications. It is very light-weight, extensible, and cross platform.

However, high transaction .NET Core applications using EF Core face performance and scalability bottlenecks in the database-tier under peak loads. This is because, although you can linearly scale the application tier by adding more application servers, you cannot add more database servers to scale it.

But, if you use a distributed cache like NCache in your .NET Core applications, you can quickly remove these performance and scalability bottlenecks and handle extreme transaction loads. 

This second 2.0 preview includes over a dozen fixes and changes over the previous 1.1 GA release. 

The biggest improvement in this release is support for C++/CLI (AKA “managed C++”). The changes for C++/CLI are primarily in Visual Studio. 

Since all we need from the build tools is MSBuild, which is MIT-licensed, we are providing a JetBrains redistributable of MSBuild that can be used freely. 

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.