Microsoft Releases First Preview of .NET 9
- Paul Thurrott
- Feb 13, 2024
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Microsoft announced the release of .NET 9 Preview 1 today and revealed its two big focus areas: Cloud-native and intelligent app development. And as always, .NET 9 will deliver performance, productivity, security, and other improvements across the platform.
“Our goal is to make .NET development more productive using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit, and cloud deployments easier using Azure services,” the .NET team writes in the announcement post. “We’ll continue to work closely with our industry partners, like Canonical and Red Hat, to ensure that .NET works great wherever you use it.”
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Here’s what’s new.
Cloud-native. Building off its .NET Aspire cloud-ready work in .NET 8, the .NET team will try to address the unique requirements of so-called cloud-native apps with improvements across the stack. Additionally, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code will deliver new development and deployment experiences for .NET Aspire, including configuring components, debugging (including hot-reload) AppHost and child processes, and developer dashboard integration. Related to this, Microsoft also shipped .NET Aspire Preview 3 today.
AI. After focusing on AI workloads in .NET 8, .NET 9 will make it even easier to integrate AI capabilities into existing and new apps. This work will include libraries and documentation for OpenAI and OSS AI models (hosted and local), among other things.
.NET 9 backlog. The .NET 9 project backlog on GitHub provides some hints about other areas the team will try to focus on in this release, though there will be more details later. For example, the .NET MAUI team is working on implementing Swift language interoperability and custom cursors. And ASP.NET Core has a long to-do list spanning Blazor Web, Blazor Server, Hot Reload, and more.
Developers interested in getting started can download the .NET 9 Preview 1 release now. As always, Microsoft plans to ship regular updates on a predictable cadence and will ship .NET 9 at .NET Conf in November.