What’s New in .NET 8: Know the Key Features and Changes

Updated 20 May 2024
Published 30 Nov 2023
Satyam Chaturvedi 2056 Views
What's New in .NET 8 Know the Key Features and Changes

.NET has been around for a couple of decades, and it has single-handedly revolutionized application development. It has helped people build highly scaled and robust apps for a variety of operating systems and devices.

The .NET has been extremely successful, and it gained momentum over the years and showed no signs of stopping.

Now, Microsoft has decided to transform its technology offerings with the release of .NET 8. It has released .NET 8 at .NET conference 2023, a three-day virtual event (November 14–16).

.NET 8 comes with hundreds of performance, security, capability, and stability improvements, as well as tooling and platform enhancements that can transform the innovation capability and productivity of software developers.

.NET 8 completely changes the way we develop dynamic and smart cloud-native apps as well as high-traffic services that scale in real-time. It doesn’t matter if you are planning to deploy your application to Windows or Linux using a cloud app model or containers, .NET 8 makes it easy for you.

.NET 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s open-source software development platform, marks an important milestone in the evolution of .NET. It paves the way for more versatile and powerful application development.

.NET 8 Roadmap

The .NET 8 roadmap shows how the .NET platform and its significant components have evolved.

Here’s a brief overview of the key milestones:

  • Preliminary planning and design.
  • Features development and implementation.
  • Preview released for feedback and testing.
  • Release Candidate (RC) versions to confirm stability.
  • Official .NET 8 Release

What’s New Features includes in .NET 8?

1- Unparalleled Performance

.NET 8 prioritizes performance optimization, enabling developers to create web applications that are faster, more responsive, and resource-efficient.

It comes with a new code generator known as Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), which is enabled by default and can enhance your app’s performance by up to 20%.

It is based on the AVX-512 instruction set, which enables developers to perform parallel operations on 512-bit vectors of data, which allows you to process more data in less time.

2- Enhanced JSON Handling

.NET 8 introduces improvements to System. Text.Json, enhancing its capabilities for serialization and deserialization.

Support for new numeric types, including the half struct, has been added, enabling efficient data exchange with machine learning models.

Additionally, the source generator for System. Text.Json has been enhanced to better support native AOT, making it a viable option for high-performance applications.

3- Blazor Advancements

.NET’s web framework for developing interactive client-side applications receives significant enhancements in .NET 8.

Developers can now combine blazor Server and blazor Web Assembly within a single application, enabling seamless switching between server and client rendering based on user context.

Additionally, a new Jiterpreter-based runtime for blazor Web Assembly boosts performance and reduces memory usage.

4- Dependency Injection (DI) Enhancements

.NET 8 introduces a friendly metrics API for Dependency Injection (DI), providing a standardized way to collect and monitor DI usage metrics. This enables developers to gain insights into DI container performance and identify potential bottlenecks.

5- Artificial Intelligence

.NET 8 enables you to infuse Artificial Intelligence into your.NET applications. Large Language Models and Generative AI are revolutionizing AI and software development, by allowing developers to build and integrate AI-powered experiences in their apps.

.NET 8 makes it very easy for developers to leverage Artificial Intelligence using its out-of-the-box AI features in the .NET SDK, which is first-in-class. It also ensures seamless integration with several AI tools available in the market.

6- .NET 8 Container Enhancements

It allows you to package your apps with containers more simply and securely than ever. The .NET Software Development Kit tools are non-root by default and publish container images without a Docker file.

Due to low-sized .NET base images, you can deploy containerized applications much faster. It also includes an experimental variant of images that delivers truly minimal app sizes for native AOT.

You can use Opt-in to securely harden your UBUNTU images to decrease your attack surface to the lowest possible. It also offers enhanced SDK tooling and Docker files, which let you develop container images and applications for any architecture.

7- .NET Aspire

.NET 8 offers this opinionated stack to develop resilient, production-ready, configurable, and observable cloud-native apps. It offers numerous components, which are improved for cloud-native by including resilience, telemetry, health checks, and configuration by default.

It offers a sophisticated yet simple local developer experience. It makes it seamless to discover, acquire, and configure important dependencies for cloud-native apps.

8- DevOps Improvements

.NET 8 brings several improvements to DevOps workflows, including:

  • Enhanced tooling for building and publishing native AOT applications.
  • Improved support for containerization and Kubernetes.
  • Simplified deployment processes for cloud-native applications.

9- Native AoT

With Native AoT, you can initiate a seamless journey towards sustainable and higher-density computing. .NET 8 lets you compile your .NET applications into native code, which starts instantly and consumes much less memory.

You no longer need to wait for the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile your app code at run time. Also, there is no need to deploy the IL code and JIT compiler at all.

AOT application deploys only the required code, and it is empowered to execute even in controlled environments that don’t allow JIT compiler.

10- .NET MAUI

.NET MAUI offers you a single codebase and single project system to develop iOS, Mac Catalyst, WinUI, and Android apps. The experimental Native AOT supports targeting iOS-like platforms.

.NET 8 comes with a fresh Visual Studio Code extension for .NET MAUI, that offers you capable tools to build cross-platform .NET desktop and mobile applications. It comes with Android API 34 and Xcode 15, which allows developers to target the latest versions of Android and iOS with ease.

11- C# 12 Features

.NET 8 offers extremely simplified syntax, which enhances overall developer productivity and makes the entire process enjoyable.

It allows developers to build primary constructors in any struct or class with an elegant yet simple syntax. No more boilerplate code to kick-start your properties and fields.

Additional Features in .NET 8:

  • ASP.NET Core – It simplifies the identity for Blazor and SPA (single-page applications) by offering a fresh identity UI, token support, cookie-based authentication, and pre-built APIs. It also improves minimal APIs with anti-forgery and form-binding support to ensure adequate protection against XSRF/CSRF (cross-site request forgery).
  • ASP.NET Core tooling – .NET 8 comes with auto-completion, analyzers, and Route syntax highlighting, which enables developers to build robust Web APIs.
  • Entity Framework Core – It offers primitive collections, “complex types” as value objects, and seamless SQL Server support for hierarchical data.
  • NuGet – It assists you in evaluating your NuGet packages in projects for any known security vulnerabilities.
  • .NET Runtime – It offers fresh AOT compilation mode for Android and WASM (Web Assembly).
  • .NET SDK – It revives the production-ready defaults and terminal build output.
  • WPF – .NET 8 supports enabled HW Acceleration and Open folder dialog in RDP.
  • ARM64 – .NET 8 comes with superior code quality and significant feature enhancements for the ARM64 platform.
  • Debugging – .NET 8 displays seamless debug summaries and offers simplified debug proxies for frequently used .NET types.
  • System.Text.Json – It not only improves the Native AOT support but also helps in populating read-only members and customizing unmapped member handling.
  • .NET Community Toolkit – .NET 8 enhances the development of .NET libraries and apps while ensuring they are AOT compatible and trim.
  • Azure – .NET 8 enjoys seamless support of the Azure ecosystem including Azure’s PaaS services for Linux and Windows, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, and Static Web Applications.
  • F# 8 – .NET 8 comes with important language changes, usability improvements, performance enhancement, and diagnostic capabilities. It also offers numerous enhancements to the FSharp.Core standard library.

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How to get started with .NET 8?

To gain a seamless development experience with .NET 8, you may use the latest release of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code’s C# Development Kit. Past that you must do the following:

  • Download .NET 8 from Microsoft’s official website.
  • Try the new .net features, and APIs and test your application for compatibility. It will help you observe if your application is impacted by behavior changes in .NET 8.
  • Test your application with opt-in changes.
  • Use Upgrade Assistant to upgrade your existing application.
  • Confirm if you are supported, .NET 8 has been supported by Microsoft for three years as an LTS (long-term support) release.
  • Follow and implement the best architecture and coding practices with the new eShop sample.

Conclusion: .NET 8: A Platform Poised for Success

.NET 8 stands as a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to innovation and developer satisfaction. .NET 8 marks a significant step forward in the evolution of the .NET platform, delivering a wealth of new features and enhancements that empower developers to create even more performant, scalable, and secure applications.

With its focus on performance optimization, JSON handling, Blazor advancements, DI enhancements, DevOps improvements, and a range of additional features, .NET 8 positions itself as a powerful and versatile platform for modern web, cloud, and mobile application development.

As an experienced .NET Development Company with a decade of expertise and professional and certified .NET developers, we’ve helped businesses of all sizes.

We’ve crafted over 50+ secure and robust desktop and web app projects leveraging the power of .NET and integrating databases and APIs using our end-to-end .NET development services. Schedule a consultation today to discuss your project requirements.

Satyam Chaturvedi

Satyam Chaturvedi is a Digital Marketing Manager at Arka Softwares, a leading app development company dealing in modern and futuristic solutions. He loves to spend his time studying the latest market insights.

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