.NET 6 – Just call me a .NET
.NET 6 is a truly unified development platform that allows developers to build applications for the cloud, web, desktop, mobile, gaming, IoT, and AI. All these sub-platforms share common base class libraries, APIs, and underlying infrastructure including language and compilers.
.NET 6 will be supported for three years as the latest long-term support (LTS) release.
What Is New In .NET 6.0
- .NET 6 is the latest version of .NET which was released in Nov 2021. Not only is .NET 6 a much-improved version of the framework compared to its predecessors, but it also introduces some of the coolest features we’ve seen in some of the most popular platforms and languages.
- .NET 6 is the fastest version of .NET.
- C# 10 and F# 6 are the latest versions of C# and F#.
Hot Reload
- Hot Reload is one of the coolest features added to .NET that allows developers to modify the source code while it is running and visualize these changes in real-time without the need to restart the application. Hot Reload works in both Visual Studio and CLI.
ASP.NET Core 6.0
- ASP.NET Core 6.0 offers updates and improvements in several areas such as Minimal API, SignalR, Razor Compiler, ASP.NET Performance and API improvements, and Blazor.
.NET MAUI
- .NET MAUI, short for .NET Multi-platform App UI is one of the newest features of . NET. It is the next avatar of Xamarin and a multi-UI platform. .NET MAUI allows you to write code in a single project that delivers a modern client app experience across desktop and mobile operating systems. .NET MAUI is not production ready yet but is expected to be released soon.
Azure App Service
- Azure Functions now supports running serverless functions in .NET 6.
- Azure Static Web Apps now supports full-stack .NET 6 applications with Blazor WebAssembly frontends and Azure Function APIs.
- Cloud diagnostics have been improved with OpenTelemetry and dotnet monitor, which is now supported in production and available with Azure App Service.
Other Key .NET Updates
- JSON APIs are more capable and have higher performance with a source generator for the serializer.
- Minimal APIs introduced in ASP.NET Core to simplify the getting started experience and improve the performance of HTTP services.
- Single-page apps built with ASP.NET Core now use a more flexible pattern that can be used with Angular, React, and other popular frontend JavaScript frameworks.
- HTTP/3 has been added so that ASP.NET Core, HttpClient, and gRPC can all interact with HTTP/3 clients and servers.
- File IO now has support for symbolic links and has greatly improved performance with a rewritten-from-scratch FileStream.
- Security has been improved with support for OpenSSL 3, the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme, and runtime defense-in-depth mitigations.
- Single-file apps (extraction-free) can be published for Linux, macOS, and Windows (previously only Linux).
- IL trimming is now more capable and effective, with new warnings and analyzers to ensure correct final results.
- Source generators and analyzers have been added that help you produce better, safer, and higher-performance code.
- Source build enables organizations like Red Hat to build .NET from source and offer their own builds to their users.
- .NET 6 provides better support for containers that makes .NET 6 app packing, deployment, and execution much easier and resource-friendly.
- Improvements in Windows Forms.
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