At Microsoft Build Live today, we are sharing a first look at our plans for .NET Core 3. The highlight of .NET Core 3 is support for Windows desktop applications, specifically Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), and UWP XAML. You will be able to run new and existing Windows desktop applications on .NET Core and enjoy all the benefits that .NET Core has to offer. 

Akka.NET is an open-source actor model framework written exclusively for Microsoft.NET in C# and compatible with .NET Core. It simplifies the building of scalable, concurrent, high-throughput, and low-latency systems, making life for software developers a bit easier. Zoran Maksimovic's Akka.NET Succinctly will show readers what an actor model is and how to work with actors in Akka.NET, taking them from an actor's lifecycle through to unit testing.

Stairway to XML

XML has been part of the SQL Standard since 2003, and is essential for any DBA because so many of the dynamic management views return XML data. Now that the industry is more used to data defined by document markup, it is becoming more important than ever for Database Developers and DBAs to understand the technology and to know where it makes sense to use XML. In this book, originally a series of articles on SQLServerCentral.com, Robert Sheldon flexes his talent to make the complicated seem simple. 

Coursera is Removing Hundreds of Courses. Here is a Guide To Get Them While You Can 

AutoMapper has been a popular library in the .NET open source community for a long time. As their site says:

AutoMapper is a simple little library built to solve a deceptively complex problem - getting rid of code that mapped one object to another. This type of code is rather dreary and boring to write, so why not invent a tool to do it for us? 

Moving the standards work into the open, under the .NET Foundation, makes it easier for standardization work. Everything from language innovation and feature design through implementation and on to standardization now takes place in the open. It will be easier to ask questions among the language design team, the compiler implementers, and the standards committee. Even better, those conversations will be public. 

This is the first of an eight part series where I am joined by Phil Japikse to discuss design patterns. A design pattern is a best practice you can use in your code to solve a common problem.  In this episode, Phil demonstrates the Command and Memento patterns. 

Episodes in this series:

• Command/Memento patterns (this episode)
• Strategy pattern
• Template Method pattern (to be published 7/20)
• Observer/Publish-Subscribe patterns (to be published 7/25)
• Singleton pattern (to be published 8/8)
• Factory patterns (to be published 8/10)
• Adapter/Facade patterns (to be published 8/15)
• Decorator pattern (to be published 8/17) 

Welcome to .NET 8! The first preview is ready for you to download: claim your copy of the first .NET 8 preview and start building applications today. Scroll down to see the list of features included in this preview. .NET 8 is a long-term support (LTS) release. This blog post covers the major themes and goals that drive the prioritization and selection of enhancements to develop. .NET 8 preview and release candidate builds will be delivered monthly. As usual, the final release will be delivered sometime in November at .NET Conf. 

This issue represents the list of major investments our team will focus on during the .NET 7 timeframe. It does not include all the features and bugfixes we will be tackling during this time. 

EF7 will be the default data stack for ASP.NET 5 applications, but we will not recommend it as an alternative to EF6 in other applications until we have more functionality implemented