.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. 

Repository for the Packt Publishing book titled "C# 12 and .NET 8 - Modern Cross-Platform Development Fundamentals" by Mark J. Price  

.NET Aspire is a new framework from Microsoft for simplifying cloud-native development with .NET. It provides an opinionated stack and developer experience for building resilient, observable applications.  

A .NET guideline specifies that an application should never throw a NullReferenceException. However, many applications and libraries do. The NullReferenceException is the most common exception happening. That’s why C# 8 tries to get rid of it. With C# 8, reference types are not null be default. This is a big change, and a great feature. However, what about all the legacy code? Can old libraries be used with C# 8 applications, and can C# 7 applications make use of C# 8 libraries?

This article demonstrates how C# 8 allows mixing old and new assemblies. 

• It's good enough for many situations and dead simple to use.
• Most published datasets today are in CSV format.
• Many data processing tools still output CSV files.
• Its human-readability is unmatched among data formats.

One Blazor Template to Rule Them All in .NET 8

In .NET 8 there is a new project in town that unifies the developing experience between Blazor Server and Blazor Web Assembly application models. In this video we will go over the new template and how we can get started using it! 

explore what's new in C# 8, as well as what we can expect in the near (and far) future of C#!
We'll talk about:
- News in C# 8
- Pattern Matching (incl. Record Types)
- Nullable Reference Types and How to Avoid Null Reference Exceptions
- How Async & Await is Improving

Even though C# 8.0 is still months away, planning has begun for C# 8.x. Some of these features are new, while others were previously considered for C# 8. And as always, this list is subject to change. 

Pony is an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language.