This week, Microsoft released the February 2022 Security and Quality Rollup for .NET Framework. This release does not contain any security improvements. For the most recent security updates, see here.

With this, several reliability and quality improvement have been made, including:

  • CLR: Addresses rare crashes and hangs that can appear in cases where GC occurs while another thread is in the middle of certain special paths used to invoke shared-generic code from non-shared-generic contexts.
  • WPF: Addresses a hang when scrolling a list control where certain conditions are met, addresses an exception “Height must be non-negative” that can occur with the addition of items or groups to the collection displayed by an items control, and addresses an issue where a shared ContextMenu no longer displays after it fails to display once because its owner was removed from the visual tree.

For more information, visit here. 

Support ending for older versions of Visual Studio

In order to keep users secure, Microsoft has announced that several older versions of Visual Studio will no longer be supported in the near future. These include Visual Studio 2012 with support ending January 9, 2023, Visual Studio 2017 with mainstream support ending April 12, 2022, Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7 with support ending April 12, 2022, and Visual studio 2019 Preview Channel with support ending after April 2022.

With this, Microsoft recommends that users of these versions upgrade to Visual Studio 2022, especially those currently using the Community Edition. With Visual Studio 2022, users gain access to three channels: Preview Channel, Current Channel, and Long-Term Servicing Channels.

To learn more, visit here.

Elastic 8.0 released

With this release come several enhancements being made to Elasticsearch’s vector search capabilities, native support for modern natural language processing models, increasingly specified data onboarding, and a streamlined security experience. 

Additionally, users are able to perform named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, text classification, and more straight from Elasticsearch, without any additional coding. 

Elastic 8.0 is generally available now on Elastic Cloud, the hosted Elasticsearch offering that includes all of the new features in this latest release. See here to get started.