• Overhauled memory management for vacuuming, resulting in significantly lower memory usage and running time. More on this here.
• Incremental backup support.
• Faster B-tree index scans.
• MERGE enhancements, including view support.
• New functions to extract elements from UUIDs.
• WAL improvements – up to 2x write throughput on some workloads.
• Improvements to SQL/JSON support, including JSON_TABLE.
• Bulk loading improvements and perf improvements for COPY which gains the ON_ERROR ignore option to ignore errors.
• Identity columns on partitioned tables.

We are extremely excited to announce the general availability of EF Core 3.0and EF 6.3 on  nuget.org . 

What’s new in EF Core 3.0

Including major features, minor enhancements, and bug fixes, EF Core 3.0 contains more than 600 product improvements. Here are some of the most important ones:

•  LINQ overhaul
•  Restricted client evaluation
•  Single SQL statement per LINQ query
•  Cosmos DB support
•  C# 8.0 support (Asynchronous streams, Nullable reference types)
•  Interception of database operations
•  Reverse engineering of database views
•  Dependent entities sharing a table with principal are now optional

On many of the expressions we’ve tried, these changes routinely result in throughput improvements of 3-6x, and in some cases, much more.  

Here’s a look at a handful of the changes since our last alpha:

• Overhauled spacing utilities to use a numerical tiering (to avoid confusion with grid tiers).
• Continued refactoring efforts to replace markup-specific selectors with classes across several components (including pagination, lists, and more). Still more to do here with additional components.
• Reverted media queries and grid containers from rems to pixels as viewports are not affected by font-size. See #17403 for details. We’ve got a ton of grid work left, too. Feel free to follow along with#18471.
• Reverted .0625rem width borders to 1px for more consistent component borders that avoid zoom and font-size bugs across browsers.
• Renamed .img-responsive to .img-fluid to avoid future confusion on the various responsive image solutions out there.
• Replaced ZeroClipboard with clipboard.js for Flash-independent copy buttons.
• Inputs and buttons now share the same border variable to ensure components are always sized similarly.
• Updated all pseudo-element selectors to use the spec’s preferred double colon (e.g., ::before as opposed to :before).
• Cards now have outline variants and mixins to support extending base classes further.
• Utility classes for floats and text alignment now have responsive ranges. This means we’ve dropped the non-responsive classes to avoid duplication.
• Added support for jQuery 2.
• And hundreds more Sass improvements, bug fixes, documentation updates, and more. 

Today, we’re releasing .NET 5.0 Preview 2. It contains a set of smaller features and performance improvements. We’re continuing to work on the bigger features that will define the 5.0 release, some of which are starting to show up as initial designs at dotnet/designs.  

.NET 6 is coming and, with it, some notable Blazor improvements. Dynamic components, hot reload, Blazor MAUI apps—the list goes on and on. Here are some of the main highlights. 

It includes a chart control for Windows Forms, HTTP/2 support, GC updates to use less memory, support for CPU limits with Docker, the addition of PowerShell in .NET Core SDK Docker container images, and other improvements.  

Today, we’re releasing .NET 5.0 Preview 3. It contains a set of new features and performance improvements. We’re continuing to work on the bigger features that will define the 5.0 release. 

Here are a couple of the most relevant improvements you may want to verify:

• Work on the EF Core in-memory provider was finished and most query features should now be working (the majority of it went into RC1)
• EF Core’s compilation performance was improved significantly for complex queries