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What's New in .NET Core 2.1 Previews

Microsoft this week announced the second previews of .NET Core 2.1 and its like-versioned associates, ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core.

.NET Core is a general-purpose, cross-platform, open source development platform maintained by Microsoft, the .NET Foundation and general .NET community. Developers can use it on Windows, macOS and Linux to create device, cloud and embedded/IoT applications. Its ASP.NET and Entity Framework cousins are used for Web and data-driven development, respectively.

As reported earlier, .NET Core is a primary focus point for future Visual Studio development.

.NET Core 2.1 Preview 2 includes several minor enhancements in preparation of the final release expected within the next few months. One of those is quicker builds -- triggered in the Visual Studio IDE as well as the command line -- especially for incremental builds.

"We've made improvements in the CLI and in MSBuild in order to make the tools deliver a much faster experience," Microsoft's Rich Lander said in a blog post on Wednesday (April 11), exactly parroting the verbiage of February's Preview 1 announcement.

Other improvements include: new SDK commands; a new deployment and extensibility experience for global tools, based on npm global tools; consolidation of Docker Hub repositories; new support for the Ubuntu 18.04 and ARM32 OSes; and many more.

ASP.NET Core 2.1.0 Preview 2, meanwhile, incorporates refinements gleaned from feedback about the first preview that was released in February. "New in ASP.NET Core 2.1 is support for building Razor UI in class libraries," said Microsoft's Damian Edwards in a blog post. "In Preview 2 we've made various improvements to simplify authoring Razor UI in class libraries through the introduction of the new Razor SDK."

Entity Framework Core 2.1 Preview 2 builds on the implementation of many features introduced in the first February preview, including: GroupBy translation; lazy loading; parameters in entity constructors; value conversion; query types; data seeding; System.Transactions support; and many more. More on those can be found in this blog post.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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