Working as a .NET Professional is a tumultuous rollercoaster ride of emotional highs and crushing lows. It’s likely the same for other communities, with different flavors of success and failures. I have over a decade of .NET development work, and I am here to share some general mantras that have served me well. 

.NET 8 Preview 3 is now available. It includes changes to build paths, workloads, Microsoft.Extensions, and containers. It also includes performance improvements in the JIT, for Arm64, and dynamic PGO. If you missed the March preview, you may want to read the Preview 2 post. 

The C# language itself has changed little in version 6, the main importance of the release being the introduction of the Roslyn .NET Compiler Platform. However the New features and improvements that have been made to C# are welcome because they are aimed at aiding productivity. Paulo Morgado explains what they are, and how to use them. 

These are the customer-reported issues addressed in 15.8.4:

• Constexpr function with explicit (void) parameter crashes MSVC 15.8.0 release.
• TypeScriptLspCodeActionProvider encountered an error and has been disabled.
• The 'Shared Web Components' package did not load correctly.
• Editing CSS with Browser Link enabled can crash Visual Studio.
• Service Fabric Deployment fails in 15.8.0.
• Incorrect error for constexpr pointer to members with VS2017 15.8.
• Constexpr doesn't support __declspec(dllimport) in VS2017 15.8.
• C++ VS 2017 Update 8 difference in member function pointer between C++14 and C++17 modes leads to crashes.
• TestExplorer locking up UI in latest build.
• [WebKit] "Already defined symbol" for static template member definition (regression).
• VS 15.8.0 Internal compiler error.
• Internal compiler error in constexpr function.
• Test Explorer Window remains blank with Express.
• Visual Studio 2017 fails to open on FIPS-enabled machine..
• VS2017 15.8 Internal Compiler Error 'msc1.cpp', line 1518 when evaluating simple constexpr function.
• Fatal error C1001 after update to VS 15.8.0.
• Migrating to VS2017 15.8: Internal compiler error when using constexpr functions as template parameters.
• Internal compiler error when compiling a template function with a constexpr in VC++ 15.8.0.
• Code generated by VC 15.8.1 compiler lead to crash. 

Today, the Entity Framework Core team announces the second preview release of EF Core 6.0. This release includes changes to handling the synchronization context when SaveChangesAsync is called, smoother integration with System.Linq.Async, updates to string concatenation and improvements to free text search. 

Learn to leverage a variety of PowerShell commands to invoke scripts that work with existing frameworks, including .NET and XML, to optimize productivity. 

• Outstanding support for T4 templates is here with capabilities such as template execution, debugging, code highlighting, navigation, refactorings, code completion, and much more. 

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 10 AVC/H.264 improvements in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview