Users of Microsoft’s various development services got plenty to enjoy yesterday with the release of several updates. Redmond rolled out updates for .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework Core. Each of the services was bumped to version 2.2 in preview (Preview 2), with the latter scoring Azure Cosmos DB support
For .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2, Microsoft did not introduce much features to the package. However, the company has now made tiered compilation available. This was first introduced in .NET Core 2.1 and allows performance in steady-state and start-up environments.
In version 2.1, Tiered Compilation was an optional choice. Microsoft wanted to continue testing while the service was in the wild. Previously, users would have to enable tiered compilation via application configuration or an environment variable. In version 2.2 the feature is available by default.
ASP.NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 has also been sent out. This release is more feature-rich and will appeal to developers running Visual Studio 15.9. Specifically, applications are now supported in the IIS worker process. This is important because hosted apps now longer need to reverse-proxy requests to another process.
It is worth remembering that the hosting through IIS worker process is turned on by default in VS 15.9.
Entity Framework Core 2.2 Preview 2
Entity Framework (EF) developers were also treated to an update yesterday, one which has been much-anticipated. That’s because this preview finally adds support for Azure Cosmos DB, a cloud database that allows customers to power planet-scale cloud services and huge data applications.
At launch, Azure Cosmos DB was first of its kind service with guaranteed uptime, consistency, throughput, and latency at the 99th percentile.
