As is customary, November has brought us the next iteration of .NET – .NET 7! The teams are certainly getting the big releases out before the end of the year.
The list of improvements and new capabilities arriving in .NET 7 is enormous, it looks like a big leap in capability.
For a very in-depth look at .NET 7 (over 11,000 words!), head over to the release blog on DevBlogs. For an overview and the highlights, read on.
.NET 7.0 Highlights
Based on the .NET 7 announcement blog, this list is the key focus and takeaway of what you are getting with .NET 7.
- Improved unification with:
- One Base Class Library
- New Target Framework Moniker
- Native support for ARM64
- Enhanced .NET support on Linux
- Built for modern cloud-native apps:
- .NET MAUI is now a part of .NET 7
- The .NET Upgrade Assistant which on top of guidance in some cases can perform migrations for you
- Azure support from day one
- Built-in container support
- Simpler than ever:
- Write less and simplify your code with C# 11
- Inclusion of Generic Math in the base class library
- Performance improvements include:
- On Stack Replacement (OSR)
- Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization that works with OSR
- Native AOT
Additionally, .NET 7 was released alongside all of the following:
- Visual Studio 2022 17.4
- ASP.NET Core 7
- Entity Framework Core 7
- .NET MAUI
- Windows Forms
- WPF
- Orleans 7
How to Upgrade
If you are already on .NET Core (simply .NET from version 5.0 onwards) then it is a simple upgrade. However, if you are on a .NET Framework version, then per this documentation the recommendation currently is to extend rather than migrate.
You can download .NET 7.0 here.
