New Previews for .NET 7, EF7, ASP.NET Core and .NET MAUI RC3 -- Visual Studio Magazine

New Previews for .NET 7, EF7, ASP.NET Core and .NET MAUI RC3

By David Ramel
05/11/2022

Microsoft shipped fourth previews for .NET 7 (including ASP.NET Core) and Entity Framework 7, along with an unusual Release Candidate 3 for .NET MAUI, the evolution of Xamarin.Forms that adds support for building desktop apps.

Except for the latter, which "slipped the schedule" and missed the .NET 6 debut in November, all the offerings are on track to hit general availability this coming November. .NET MAUI will probably hit GA status later this month, perhaps during the May 24-26 Build developer conference. Typically major frameworks see one or two RCs before going GA.

.NET MAUI has been in a production-ready, go-live state for a while now, so it mostly received fixes and polishing in RC3. A May 10 blog post focuses on navigation, specifically the two primary ways developers can implement navigation in their applications.

"The easiest yet power [sic] option is running your app in Shell which provides details optimized for both desktop and mobile patterns," Microsoft said. "The second option is to use the base navigation page controls directly: FlyoutPage, TabbedPage, and NavigationPage."

Here are summaries -- with links for more information -- for the fourth previews of the other frameworks:

.NET 7 Preview 4
"The fourth preview of .NET 7 includes enhancements to observability in the .NET implementation of OpenTelemetry, the addition of properties to track microseconds and nanoseconds in date and time structures, new metrics for caching extensions, performance-boosting 'on stack replacement,' APIs to work with .tar archives, and additional features as part of an ongoing effort to improve the performance of and add features to regular expressions in .NET 7."

ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 7 Preview 4
Highlights of this preview include:

Entity Framework 7 Preview 4
"In addition to bug fixes and foundation work for larger features, this preview includes updates to ensure that converters and comparers are handled by type mapping and to support using converters with value generators. Be sure to read the full plan for EF7 to learn what's on the roadmap."

Speaking of roadmaps, here's a list of others:

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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