.NET 8 Preview 1 is now available! This is the first preview of the next major version of .NET, which will include the next wave of innovations for web development with ASP.NET Core.

In .NET 8 we plan to make broad investments across ASP.NET Core. Below are some of the areas we plan to focus on: 

There are two MySQL providers for Entity Framework Core:
- The official one from MySQL: MySql.Data.EntityFrameworkCore. As of now, the latest version is 8.0.19, and works with Entity Framework Core 2.1 (and probably also 2.2). Since EF Core 3.0 is a major version with breaking changes, you cannot use it with this provider.
- The Pomelo provider: Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql. There is a 3.1 version of this provider.
In other words, if you want to use EF Core 3.0/3.1 with MySQL, at this point you need to use the Pomelo provider (or wait for the official MySQL one to get released).

Soon the next major version of the framework will come out, which breaks backward compatibility. Apparently, even developers of the framework realized that there is something wrong and decided to rewrite the framework almost from scratch. They don’t add new functionality, breaking backward compatibility, they rewrite almost everything. 

The Intersection of Microservices, Domain-Driven Design and Entity Framework Core
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) provides much of the strategic design guidance that we can use to determine the boundaries around and interactions between Microservices in our solutions. DDD also follows up with tactical design patterns for your business logic. In this session we'll take a look at some of these patterns and how EF Core naturally, or with some additional configuration, persists the data that your microservices depend on. 

Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? 

This is a set of NuGet packages that makes your Blazor apps display the source .razor file name that generated the HTML element under the mouse cursor when entering the Ctrl + Shift + F hotkeys.  

The most popular language of 2014 was JavaScript, says the language index TIOBE. 

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.