Hot on the heals of .NET 8 Preview 1 comes Preview 2! This monthly release cycle will continue until .NET 8 is released probably in November. Preview 2 includes some changes including new System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations extensions for RequiredAttribute.DisallowAllDefaultValues, RangeAttribute exclusive bounds, LengthAttribute, AllowedValuesAttribute, DenyValuesAttribute and Base64StringAttribute. Also there is new introspection support for function pointers in System.Reflection. This is the ability for reflection to obtain function pointer metadata. Be sure to read the announcement blog here.

Are you or someone you know looking to get into coding but not sure where to start? Microsoft has the answer for you. They are looking for beginners to participate in a hackathon this March. The idea is that there is a list of top Microsoft Graph scenarios that you may build or you can build one of your own with inspiration from this list. Whenever you have questions there are experts available to help guide you.

In the ever evolving world of .NET, the next major release or Long Term Supported (LTS) release had its first preview release today. LTS means it’ll be supported for 3 years instead of .NET 7’s 18 months. The changes in .NET 8 include producing Release assets by default when you call dotnet publish or dotnet pack. This can of course be reverted by changing the PublishRelease property to false. Various improvements have been made to System.