Microsoft has released .NET Core 3.1, a relatively minor update following the major release of .NET Core 3.0 earlier this year. This release aims to fix any issues and make more improvements to features introduced in .NET Core 3.0, and because of that, it"s also a long-term supported release, which means it will be supported for the next three years. .NET Core 3.0 will only be supported until March of next year.
As expected, the changelog is fairly small for this release. The only new addition in .NET Core 3.1 is support for creating C++/CLI components that target .NET Core in Visual Studio 2019, though you"ll need to install the “Desktop development with C++” workload and the “C++/CLI support” component for it to work. This will also add two new templates - CLR Class Library (.NET Core) and CLR Empty Project (.NET Core).
What this release also does is remove some form controls for Windows apps, which is likely to break some of your projects. However, these controls have been replaced by more capable successors for quite some time. Microsoft has provided a table explaining what"s changing so you can adapt accordingly:
| Old Control (API) | Recommended Replacement | Other associated APIs removed |
|---|---|---|
| DataGrid | DataGridView | DataGridCell, DataGridRow, DataGridTableCollection, DataGridColumnCollection, DataGridTableStyle, DataGridColumnStyle, DataGridLineStyle, DataGridParentRowsLabel, DataGridParentRowsLabelStyle, DataGridBoolColumn, DataGridTextBox, GridColumnStylesCollection, GridTableStylesCollection, HitTestType |
| ToolBar | ToolStrip | ToolBarAppearance |
| ToolBarButton | ToolStripButton | ToolBarButtonClickEventArgs, ToolBarButtonClickEventHandler, ToolBarButtonStyle, ToolBarTextAlign |
| ContextMenu | ContextMenuStrip | |
| Menu | ToolStripDropDown, ToolstripDropDownMenu | MenuItemCollection |
| MainMenu | MenuStrip | |
| MenuItem | ToolstripMenuItem |
This release of .NET Core is, as usual, accompanied by a new version of ASP.NET Core and EFCore. While there"s no blog post for the latter, Microsoft provided a short list of changes in ASP.NET Core:
- Partial class support for Razor components
- Pass parameters to top-level components
- New component tag helper
- Prevent default actions for events in Blazor apps
- Stop event propagation in Blazor apps
- Detailed errors during Blazor app development
- Support for shared queues in HttpSysServer
- Breaking changes for SameSite cookies
Finally, there"s also a new release of Blazor WebAssembly to go along with this. It adds support for .NET Standard 2.1 and iOS 13, among other things:
- .NET Standard 2.1 support
- Support for static assets in when publishing
- iOS 13 support
- Better linker errors
- Attach to process debugging from Visual Studio
You can learn more about what"s changed in .NET Core 3.1 as well as ASP.NET Core on GitHub. You can download .NET Core 3.1 from here.