Today we are excited to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a new no-cost distribution of OpenJDK that is open source and available for free for anyone to deploy anywhere.  

Git Virtual File System (GVFS) is an open source system that enables Git to operate at enterprise-scale. It makes using and managing massive Git repositories possible

GVFS: Git at Enterprise Scale

Today we are excited to announce the release of Entity Framework (EF) Core 2.1. This is the latest production-ready release of our open-source and cross-platform data access technology. 

Microsoft has released version 2.1 beta of its open-source Python Tools for Visual Studio, adding support for additional Web frameworks, access to the tools in Visual Studio Express, and integration with Azure publishing.

• We added support to change installation locations.
• You can Save All your pending changes before you start your update.
• The update dialog provides you even more details about your update during installation.
• C# 7.3 is included in Visual Studio version 15.7.
• We improved solution load time for C# and VB projects.
• We made numerous updates to F# and its tools, with a focus on performance.
• We reduced the time to enable IntelliSense for large .NET Core projects by 25%.
• We made Quick Info improvements and new .NET refactorings like convert for-to-foreach and make private fields readonly.
• We added the ability to publish ASP.NET Core applications to App Service Linux without containers.
• Live Unit Testing works with embedded pdbs and supports projects that use reference assemblies.
• The Test Explorer has more responsive icons during test runs.
• C++ developers can use CodeLens for unit testing.
• We added new rules enforcing items from the C++ Core Guidelines.
• Debugging large solutions with /Debug:fastlink PDBs is more robust.
• CMake integration supports CMake 3.11 and static analysis.
• Python projects support type hints in IntelliSense, and a Run MyPy command has been added to look for typing errors in your code.
• Conda environments are supported in Python projects.
• We added a next version of our Python debugger based on the popular open source pydevd debugger.
• TypeScript 2.8 is included in Visual Studio version 15.7.
• We improved Kestrel HTTPs support during debugging.
• We added support for JavaScript debugging with Microsoft Edge.
• The Debugger supports VSTS and GitHub Authentication for Source Link.
• IntelliTrace’s step-back debugging feature is supported for debugging .NET Core projects.
• We added IntelliTrace support for taking snapshots on exceptions.
• We removed the blocking modal dialog from branch checkouts in Git when a solution or project reload is not required.
• There is an option to choose between OpenSSL and SChannel in Git.
• You can create and associate Azure Key Vaults from within the Visual Studio IDE.
• Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin can automatically install missing Android API levels required by Xamarin.Android projects.
• The Xamarin.Forms XAML editor provides IntelliSense and quick fixes for conditional XAML.
• We added support for Azure, UWP, and additional project types in Visual Studio Build Tools.
• You can create build servers without installing all of Visual Studio.
• The Windows 10 April 2018 Update SDK - Build 17134 is the default required SDK for the Universal Windows Platform development workload.
• We added support for Visual State Management for all UWP apps and more.
• We enabled automatic updates for sideloaded APPX packages.
• You have new tools for migrating to NuGet PackageReference.
• We added support for NuGet package signatures.
• We added Service Fabric Tooling for the 6.2 Service Fabric release.
• We updated Entity Framework Tools to work with the EF 6.2 runtime and to improve reverse engineering of existing databases.

In an attempt to correct many perceived deficiencies in Entity Framework Core, Microsoft is introducing 40 breaking changes to EF Core 3. You can see the entire breaking changes list on Microsoft Docs, but here are some of the highlights. 

If you are updating to EF Core 8, consider using the daily builds, or wait for the 31 fixes coming in 8.0.2 in Februrary 2024 

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. 

EF Core 8 RC 2: Smaller features in EF8 - .NET Blog 

In this blog post I’m going to talk about our .NET 8.0 GC feature called DATAS (Dynamic Adaptation To Application Sizes).