Microsoft Releases .NET 8

Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of .NET 8, the latest Long Term Support (LTS)version of its open source, cross-platform, managed software development platform. As an LTS release, .NET 8 will be supported for three years.

” .NET 8 delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements, as well as platform and tooling enhancements that help increase developer productivity and speed of innovation,” Microsoft’s Gaurav Seth writes in the announcement post. “The .NET team, our partners, and the .NET community will be talking about what’s new in .NET 8 as well as what people are building with .NET today to meet their needs of tomorrow at .NET Conf 2023, a three-day virtual event (November 14-16).”

Among the advances in this release are the Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) code generator and optimizer that offers app performance improvements up to 20 percent, the AVX-512 instruction set that supports parallel operations on 512-bit vectors of data, new primitive types (numerical and beyond) that support UTF-8 formatting and parsing without any transcoding overhead, and thousands of performance improvements across the stack.

C# has been updated to version 12 with simpler constructor syntax, new default values for parameters in lambda expressions, improved handling of optional arguments, and alias directives for all types (not just named types). You can also compile .NET apps into native code, utilize Generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and other AI experiences in .NET, build full-stack web apps with Blazor, and create cross-platform mobile apps for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android with .NET MAUI (and in Visual Studio Code if desired).

Tied to this release, Microsoft is also shipping Visual Studio 2022 17.8 and the first preview of its .NET Aspire cloud-ready stack, which it says is designed for “building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.” You can learn more about .NET Aspire on the .NET Blog.

There is so much more. But definitely check out the video sessions from .NET Conf 2023, which will be available for later viewing after the live show.