We are excited to release .NET 6 Release Candidate 2. It is the second of two “go live” release candidate releases that are supported in production. For the last couple months, the team has been focused exclusively on quality improvements. There are a lot of new features in the release, which only fully come together near the end. The team is currently validating end-to-end workflows to find the places where design intentions and technical reality don’t yet fully match. That’s led to teams tightening leaky pipes and paving paths all the way to their destination. 

We are very pleased to announce the launch of our Open Source project - Fast Report Open Source.
We are hoping to develop a friendly community of .Net Core developers who will share our eagerness to create fast, powerful and convenient reporting tool for Windows, Windows Server, Linux and MacOS.
We also encourage you to be a part of the global reporting team! Join us on GitHub: github.com/FastReports/FastReport 

C# runs great on Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS (oh, and Windows); is targeted by your favorite editor; rests on a rock solid, time-tested industrial grade platform; and is open source. You want to because C# is an industry leader in language innovation, is your best option for native cross-platform mobile apps, and is toolable beyond compare.  

By placing under source control everything we need to describe any version of a database, we make it much easier to achieve consistent database builds and releases, to find out who made which changes and why, and to access all database support materials. Matthew Skelton explains how to make sure your version control system fully supports all phases of the database lifecycle, from governance, development, delivery and through to operations. 

To help you enjoy this creativity from the community, every month or two I’ll be introducing some of the new extensions that caught my eye. Here are the highlights for this month:

• UWP Tile Generator (great helper for UWP developers)
• Open Bin Folder Extension (nice and simple)
• DocPreview (Preview XML comments)
• JavaScript Snippet Pack (Code snippets for JavaScript developers) 

Open source UI components and visual style guide to create consistency and beautiful user experiences across U.S. federal government websites

Introducing Atlassian for VS Code: Bitbucket Cloud and Jira Software extension for Visual Studio Code 

Introducing U-SQL database projects – U-SQL database development and deployment made easy (public preview) 

Introducing an API for loading .dll files (and their dependencies) as 'plugins'