.NET Core 2.1.3 is available for [download] and usage in your environment. This release includes .NET Core 2.1.3, ASP.NET Core 2.1.3 and .NET Core SDK 2.1.401. 

Blazor Highlights from the Early .NET 8 Preview Releases  

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. 

Today we have several releases to talk about: there’s the release of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, the release of .NET Core 2.0, and a release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1. We’ll talk about them briefly in that order, but as always, there’s a lot more information in the release notes for each product. If you’d like to jump right in, download Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, download .NET Core 2.0, and download Visual Studio for Mac.

.NET Core 2.1.6 is available for download and usage in your environment. This release includes .NET Core 2.1.6, ASP.NET Core 2.1.6 and .NET Core SDK 2.1.500. All fixes of note can be seen in the 2.1.6 commits list. 

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. 

In this C# 8 tutorial, I am going to introduce a selection of currently planned features which will most probably end up in the final release. All of the C# 8 features are still early in development and are likely to change. 

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. 

Here are some of the reasons why nullable reference types are less than ideal:

• Invoking a member on a null value will issue a System.NullReferenceException exception, and every invocation that results in a System.NullReferenceException in production code is a bug. Unfortunately, however, with nullable reference types we “fall in” to doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing. The “fall in” action is to invoke a reference type without checking for null.
• There’s an inconsistency between reference types and value types (following the introduction of Nullable<T>) in that value types are nullable when decorated with  “?” (for example, int? number); otherwise, they default to non-nullable. In contrast, reference types are nullable by default. This is “normal” to those of us who have been programming in C# for a long time, but if we could do it all over, we’d want the default for reference types to be non-nullable and the addition of a “?” to be an explicit way to allow nulls.
• It’s not possible to run static flow analysis to check all paths regarding whether a value will be null before dereferencing it, or not. Consider, for example, if there were unmanaged code invocations, multi-threading, or null assignment/­replacement based on runtime conditions. (Not to mention whether analysis would include checking of all library APIs that are invoked.)
• There’s no reasonable syntax to indicate that a reference type value of null is invalid for a particular declaration.
• There’s no way to decorate parameters to not allow null. 

namespace CS8Tests;

public class InterceptorsSample
{
    public string GetText(string text)
    {
        return $"{text}, World!";
    }
}

namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = true, Inherited = false)]
public sealed class InterceptsLocationAttribute : Attribute
{
    public InterceptsLocationAttribute(string filePath, int line, int character)
    {
    }
}

using CS8Tests;

var example = new InterceptorsSample();
var text = example.GetText("Hello");
Console.WriteLine(text); //Hello, World!

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

namespace CS8Tests;

public static class MyInterceptor
{
    [InterceptsLocation("C:\\Path\\To\\CS8Tests\\Program.cs", 4, 20)] 
    public static string InterceptorMethod(this InterceptorsSample example, string text)
    {
        return $"{text}, DNT!";
    }
}

 error CS9137: The 'interceptors' experimental feature is not enabled in this namespace. Add
'<InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces>$(InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces);CS8Tests</InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces>'
to your project.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <!--<NoWarn>Test001</NoWarn>-->
    <InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces>$(InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces);CS8Tests</InterceptorsPreviewNamespaces>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Hello, DNT!

using CS8Tests;
using System;
using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

[CompilerGenerated]
internal class Program
{
  private static void <Main>$(string[] args)
  {
    Console.WriteLine(new InterceptorsSample().InterceptorMethod("Hello"));
  }

  public Program()
  {
    base..ctor();
  }
}

app.MapGet("/products", handler: (int? page, int? pageLength, MyDb db) => { ... })