Microsoft today announced the release of .NET 8 Preview 1, its next long-term support (LTS) release of the open-source developer platform.
“Welcome to .NET 8!” Microsoft’s Jeremy Likness writes in the announcement post. “.NET 8 preview and release candidate builds will be delivered monthly. As usual, the final release will be delivered sometime in November at .NET Conf.”
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Some of the key themes in this release include:
.NET MAUI. Microsoft’s new cross-platform app solution will offer improvements for those upgrading from Xamarin Forms, faster UI rendering, and built time and hot reload improvements.
Native AOT. Microsoft shipped the first native Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation capabilities for Windows and Linux console applications only in .NET 7, and this feature is coming to macOS in .NET 8 Preview 1 (and to ASP.NET Core at some point). AOT reduces memory footprint, startup time, and battery life.
Blazor United. This new effort will let Blazor developers create a single project with server-side rendering and client-side interactivity with Blazor Server or WebAssembly.
You can download .NET 8 Preview 1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.