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.NET 8’s New Features

Suzan Kara

On November 14th, 2023, Microsoft published and introduced.NET 8, the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version of a leading programming platform. .NET 8 includes various performance, stability, and security upgrades. Furthermore, it features platform and tool enhancements, promoting enhanced developer efficiency and innovation velocity.

.NET transforms the landscape of building intelligent, cloud-native applications and high-traffic services that scale dynamically in this latest iteration. Whether you deploy on Linux or Windows, use containers, or adopt a preferred cloud app model,.NET 8 makes it easier to design such applications. It consists of a set of well-known libraries that are currently used by a number of large-scale Microsoft services. These libraries address fundamental observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and other issues.

.NET 8 combines complex language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT, into your.NET application with ease. Blazor provides a single and robust component paradigm for solving all of your web UI requirements. Furthermore, using.NET MAUI, you can easily deploy your mobile applications on the most recent versions of iOS and Android. Furthermore, you can investigate enhanced language features in C# 12 that improve code conciseness and expressiveness.

You may get the.NET 8 SDK from here, or you can use the latest release of Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio 2022 17.8. If you already have Visual Studio 2022, you can simply upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 17.8 from the Visual Studio installer.

According to the official Microsoft DevBlog, the features of.NET 8 include a plethora of innovations. This update includes thousands of enhancements to performance, stability, and security.

Some of the Key Features are:

C# 12

  • .NET 8 release with C#12. In C# 12, any class or struct can now have primary constructors created with a concise syntax, eliminating the need for boilerplate code to initialize fields and properties.
  • Additionally, we can use new default values for parameters in lambda expressions, which enhance code expressiveness.
  • You don’t need more overloading or null checks to handle optional arguments.
  • Moreover, can use the using directive to alias any type, not just named types.

ASP.NET Core 8

  • In ASP.NET Core 8 application you can see significant performance improvements, up to 18%, compared to .NET 7.
  • Native Ahead-of-Time (AOT) support for producing self-contained apps compiled into native code, resulting in smaller deployment size, quicker startup, and reduced memory usage.

Entity Framework Core 8

  • Entity Framework Core 8 supports for complex types for value objects (without identity), for example Address or Coordinate is included.
  • You can find the added support for lazy-loading of no-tracking queries for your program.

Performance Enhancements

  • Introduction of Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), optimizing code based on real-world usage, improving app performance by up to 20%.
  • Rewriting certain methods for better performance, including List<T>.AddRange(IEnumerable<T>) and Int32.ToString().

Cloud-Native Stack (.NET Aspire)

  • .NET Aspire is another cool feature added in the .NET 8.
  • The .NET 8 has first preview of .NET Aspire, an opinionated stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications.
  • You can develop specific components for cloud-native development, such as a dashboard, telemetry, configuration, health checks, orchestration, etc.

Getting started with cloud native app with .NET Aspire can be found here.

Artificial Intelligence

  • .NET 8 makes ease of use of AI via first-class out of the box AI features in it’s SDK.
  • .NET 8 brings several enhancements to the System.Numeric library to enhance compatibility with Generative AI into .NET application. You can infuse AI into your .NET applications easily.
  • Large language Model integration with semantic Kernel.
  • It is simple to get started with Azure Open AI and Azure Cognitive Search SDKs in .NET 8.

Blazor Enhancements

  • Now, you can use Blazor for both client-side (Blazor WebAssembly) and server-side (Blazor Server) rendering in the same app.
  • It supports stateless server-side rendering, streaming rendering, progressive enhancement for navigation and form handling, and interactivity per component.

.NET MAUI

  • .NET MAUI is Successor to Xamarin.Forms, enabling the creation of projects for different platforms (WinUI, Mac, iOS, Android) with a single codebase.
  • .NET MAUI supports targeting iOS-like platforms.
  • .NET 8 release has introduced a new Visual Studio Code extension for .NET MAUI.
  • Elevated performance, reliability, and developer experience for .NET MAUI applications

ASP.NET Core 8 Hosting Recommendation

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