The Microsoft .NET Conf online event officially opened. As Microsoft’s open-source, cross-platform development platform, .NET 7 has now launched its first official version, which also means that Microsoft’s “unification work” has finally been completed.
With .NET 7, Microsoft says it’s easy to containerize .NET 7 projects, set up CI/CD workflows in GitHub Actions, and enable cloud-native observability. It has an extensive .NET package ecosystem that includes over 330,000 packages.
It is worth mentioning that .NET 7 is a Standard Term Support (STS) release and will be supported for 18 months instead of 36 months. There are currently over 8900 contributors making 28k code contributions throughout the .NET 7 release.
According to reports, the new features of .NET 7 include
ASP.NET Core 7
Entity Framework Core 7
.NET MAUI
Windows Forms
WPF
Orleans 7
.NET 7 optimizations focus on:
Unified Base Class Library (BCL), new TFM, native support for ARM64, enhanced .NET support on Linux.
Simply put, with .NET 7, developers only need to learn once and build multiple types of applications (cloud, web, desktop, mobile, gaming, IoT) repeatedly with one SDK, one runtime, one set of base libraries and AI).
In addition, Microsoft has optimized performance on Arm machines, including estimating L3 cache size, introducing LSE atomic instructions, and optimizing libraries that use intrinsics.
Microsoft .NET 6 is included in Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and can be installed using the apt install dotnet6 command. Additionally, there is an optimized, pre-built, out-of-the-box ultra-small container image.
Elsewhere, .NET is now also available for ppc64le (64-bit IBM Power) architecture for RHEL 8.7 and RHEL in addition to x64 architectures (64-bit Intel/AMD), ARM64 (64-bit ARM) and s390x (64-bit IBM Z) 9.1.
In terms of modernization, the .NET SDK already supports generating container images, and Microsoft will bring continuous performance improvements.
If you are currently using a .NET Core version, Microsoft .NET 7 is a direct upgrade, and if you are currently maintaining a .NET Framework version, Microsoft has some compelling reasons to migrate.
The .NET Upgrade Assistant includes more analyzers, code fixes, and upgrade support for more application types to help developers upgrade their .NET 7 application portfolio more easily and reduce the workload of upgrading applications. Additionally, .NET 7 makes it easier to build and deploy distributed cloud-native applications.
performance
.NET 7 has several performance optimizations such as:
On Stack Replacement (OSR), improved startup time.
Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO)
Native AOT, the main advantages are boot time, memory usage, access to restricted platforms (no JIT allowed), and less disk space.
In addition, Microsoft has clarified some breaking changes in .NET 7, and developers can refer to the official documentation.
