Microsoft has unveiled the .NET 8 open platform, created by unifying the .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Mono products. With .NET 8, you can build cross-platform applications for the browser, cloud, desktop, IoT devices, and mobile platforms using unified libraries and a common build process independent of application type. The .NET SDK 8, .NET Runtime 8, and ASP.NET Core Runtime 8 assemblies are designed for Linux, macOS и Windows.NET Desktop Runtime 8 is only available for WindowsThe project's developments are distributed under the MIT license. The .NET 8 branch is classified as LTS and will be supported for three years until November 2026.
.NET 8 includes a Runtime with the RyuJIT JIT compiler, API specifications, WPF libraries, Windows Forms, WinUI, Entity Framework, the dotnet command-line interface, as well as tools for developing microservices, libraries, server, graphical, and console applications. Separately published are the ASP.NET Core 8.0 web application development stack, the Entity Framework Core 8.0 ORM layer (drivers are available, including for SQLite and PostgreSQL), and the WPF 8 library (Windows Presentation Foundation (PF) framework Windows Forms 8 for GUI development, the Aspire 8 platform for building Cloud Native applications, the MAUI 8 framework for developing multi-platform user interfaces, and releases of the C# 12 and F# 8 languages. Support for .NET 8.0 and C# 12 is included in the free Visual Studio Code code editor.
Features of the new release:
- Major performance optimizations have been made. A new code generator that supports dynamic optimization based on code execution profiling (Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization) is enabled by default. Using the new code generator provides an increase in application performance of up to 20%. In addition, the new version adds support for AVX-512 instructions, which improves the performance of parallel operations on vector data. For primitive types, a new interface has been implemented that allows you to directly parse and format data in UTF-8 format without recoding. In TechEmpower tests, performance with the JSON API increased by 18%, and with Fortunes by 24%.
- A new .NET Aspire stack has been added, designed for developing cloud-native applications using .NET technologies. .NET Aspire provides a rich set of components that you may need to build applications that run in cloud environments, including tools for telemetry collection, configuration, health testing, and fault tolerance.
- Tools for packaging applications into isolated containers have been expanded. Publishing container images without a Dockerfile and without a root user is now supported by default. The base container image size for .NET platform components has been reduced. A minimalist image for running applications compiled into executables (Native AOT) has been added. A more secure Chiseled-based image option has been added. Ubuntu.
- Improved efficiency of compilation into self-contained executables (Native AOT), in which the entire project is initially compiled into native machine code of the target platform without the use of intermediate code and without the use of JIT.
- The capabilities of software interfaces that can be used in machine learning systems have been expanded. For example, the System.Numerics library has increased compatibility with generative AI systems. Added examples for chatbot awareness, content generation, and accessing Azure AI services.
- Blazor, a platform for building web applications in C#, has reduced page load times, improved scalability, and allowed the use of Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly in the same application to create programs that combine features. Server and the client. Jiterpreter, a new, faster WebAssembly runtime, has been added, improving UI rendering by 20%. Authentication, authorization, and identification capabilities have been expanded.
- The MAUI framework for developing multi-platform user interfaces has been expanded, providing the ability to use a single code base to build interfaces for Windows, macOS, iOS and AndroidAdded experimental support for compilation (Native AOT). Added support for Xcode 15 and Android API 34. Graphic elements and buttons have been modernized, and handling of mouse clicks and keyboard events has been improved.
- C# 12 adds support for a simplified syntax for creating primary constructors in any class and structure, and also simplifies the creation of arrays, spans, and other types of collections. Provides tools for setting default values for lambda expression parameters. Simplified handling of optional arguments. Added the ability to create aliases of any type using the “alias” directive. // Create a List a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]; // Create span arrays Span b = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'h', 'i']; // Use the spread operator to concatenate int[] array1 = [1, 2, 3]; int[] array2 = [4, 5, 6]; int[] array3 = [7, 8, 9]; int[] fullArray = [..array1, ..array2, ..array3]; // contents will be [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
- ASP.NET Core for single-page (SPA, single-page application) and web applications (Blazor) implements support for Cookie and token-based authentication. A new user interface for authentication has been proposed. Improved protection against XSRF/CSRF attacks.
- Entity Framework Core provides new complex types that can be used as objects. Added support for hierarchical data in SQL Server.
- The NuGet package manager simplifies auditing of packages in projects and provides information about the presence of known vulnerabilities.
- The .NET Runtime adds ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation mode for WebAssembly (WASM) and Android.
- WPF added a directory opening dialog (OpenFolderDialog) and enabled support for hardware acceleration in RDP.
- Significantly improved support for the ARM64 architecture and improved code quality for ARM.
- The debugger provides debugging summary display and simplified debugging layers for commonly used .NET types.
Source: opennet.ru
