In our cover story, Jeremy D. Miller shows how to make some applications perform faster using the open source Marten library. Author Shawn Wildermuth illustrates how to access Cosmos DB from a .NET Core project using .NET Core Cosmos DB library. Bilal starts a new series, demonstrating how to build MVC applications in PHP Laravel, while Wei-Meng Lee’s article is a hands-on walk through of how facial recognition works and how to train models to recognize images. Julie Lerman discusses change tracking in EF Core and Sahil discusses some info about how blockchains work. Joydip Kanjilal offers a deep dive on cashing and how to work with Azure Cache for Redis in ASP.NET Core 6.0. Paul Sheriff demonstrates how to use router classes to better maintain minimal Web APIs.