Now available in production, .NET 7 brings performance improvements and a set of functional evolutions around containers, C#, .NET MAUI, and more.
It’s the big day for the seventh version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. This update includes its share of performance optimizations and updates to certain features. Thus, the main themes of this release are: enabling developers to write powerful web APIs, build cloud-native applications, and deploy them on Linux. There is also a focus on developer productivity and project containerization, as well as building CI/CD workflows into GitHub Actions.
Available November 8 at get.dot.net/7 for Windows, Linux, and macOS, .NET 7 is the third major release in Microsoft’s unification of .NET. With .NET 7, developers can learn once and reuse their skills with a single SDK, a single runtime, and a set of core libraries to build all types of applications, including cloud, web, desktop, mobile, artificial intelligence and IoT.
A full set of improvements and evolutions
For the C# 11 language, the goal is for developers to write less code. Features such as generic type math are made possible, while coding is simplified through improvements in object initialization, raw string literals, and other capabilities. Other highlights of .NET 7 include: continued performance improvements, a single BCL (base class library), native support for ARM64 systems, support for .NET on Linux, HTTP/3 and Minimal API improvements for cloud-native applications. Also rely on native AOT for console applications, which produces binaries that are self-contained executables in a target platform’s specific file format, which has advantages such as fast startup and small, self-contained deployment. . Additionally, the F# 7 functional language features ongoing work on reliability and support for existing features.
.NET 7 is released together with ASP.NET Core 7 and Entity Framework Core 7, as well as .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and the Orleans 7 framework for building distributed applications . As for the Blazor web application development tool, .NET 7 improves the WebAssembly debugging experience and supports location change event handling. .NET MAUI, which debuted in September, had drawn the ire of some developers who didn’t think the technology was fully ready. But Scott Hunter, Microsoft vice president of products for Azure developer experience, said this week that Microsoft has since improved .NET MAUI.
Along with .NET 7, Microsoft is releasing the Visual Studio 2022 17.4 IDE. Visual Studio 2022 introduced 64-bit features in the IDE. Prior to this production release, .NET 7 went through significant testing and release candidate phases. .NET 8, which is expected to arrive in a year, is expected to focus on similar themes such as modern workloads, web APIs, and more transparent cloud-native development.