No doubt that Microsoft

.NET universe has been arising over the years and brings new features with the every new update. Last month, on the occasion of .Net 20 years celebration, Microsoft has announced .Net 7 preview 1.

.Net 7 has the same foundation as .Net 6, which includes simplified development experience, more productivity & a unified block of libraries & platform. Aside that, there are three major topics that we’ll see improvements in .Net 7.

• Modern Client Development: .Net MAUI
• Cloud Native & Containers
• Upgrading existing .Net Apps
• JWT Authentication Improvements & Automatic Configuration

.NET 7 is Coming with

C# 11. Before we jump into the details for .Net 7, Let’s quickly look at the .Net release cycle & support policy.

.Net Release Cycle & Support Policy

Starting with .Net 5, Microsoft committed to a yearly release of a new .Net version. The release will usually be on November each year.

There’s a difference between Even .Net version numbers & Odd version numbers. .Net 6 & .Net 8 are long-term supported versions. These versions will get patches for 3 years. Whereas .Net 7 is a short term release that will get patches for 18 months, which means after the .Net 8 comes out, you will have around 6 months to upgrade from .Net 7 to .Net 8.

Here’s the detail of features & improvements.

Modern Client Development: .Net MAUI

.Net MAUI is the new cross-platform native UI development toolkit for the .Net & will be part of .Net 7. MAUI preview 13 has been released with improved tooling & performance.

Cloud Native & Containers

Microsoft wants to focus on the developers journey for cloud native applications. Specifically they want to improve 2 points with .Net 7:

• Simplifying the setup & configuration necessary to implement secure authentication and authorization.
• Improving the performance of application startup & runtime execution.

If we talk about improvements, Microsoft announced that they’ll continue to invest in orleans, which is a .Net cross-platform framework for building distributed applications.

They also plan to simplify & improve the developer experience for containerized .Net applications.

Upgrading existing .Net Apps

Microsoft want to help developers with upgrading existing .Net applications to .Net 7 & they plan to improve the Update Assistant to support additional use cases.

In short, it should become even simpler to upgrade existing .Net application with .Net 7.

JWT Authentication Improvements & Automatic Configuration

This is one of the Best Improvement Microsoft Announced in .Net 7 Preview 5 with some great improvements. I have written a detailed article on how we can configure JWT Authentication in .Net.

JWT Authentication Improvements & Automatic Configuration in .Net 7

Some more improvements & features

A lot is going on Asp.Net Core development. I mentioned 4 improvements above that I believe are the most important. There are some more to mention.

Performance Improvements

Additional performance improvements with .Net 7 to make it faster & more efficient. .Net 6 already had a massive impact on performance & .Net 7 will take this even further. Even if you don’t run into performance issues today, it will save your money without altering your source code when running on the cloud.

Official HTTP 3 Support

Http 3 was shipped as a preview feature in .Net 6 & will be a part of .Net 7 & enabled by default. In future .Net 7 preview versions, we’ll see performance improvements & additional tls features.

Minimal APIs Improvements

Minimal APIs were introduced in .Net 6 & allows you to create lightweight APIs without the overhead of controllers.

With .Net 7, we will see additional improvements & support for currently missing features like grouping endpoints with a common route prefix. Endpoint filters will allow you to implement crosscutting concerns that you can only do with controllers using action filters today.

Blazor Hybrid Support

Blazor Hybrid Support will allow us to take existing blazor components & put them together into a desktop application using a webview control with access to all underlying hardware APIs. It will allow developers to use web technologies to build desktop applications with access to system resources such as the local file system or a webcam.

Conclusion

There’s so much going on just a few months after .Net 6 shipped we already see a clear picture of what will be coming before the end of 2022 with .Net 7. So, this is the best time to shift on .Net 7. There are things that I haven’t covered in this short overview of .Net 7 important features. However you can read the .Net 7 preview 1 announce post. You’ll find additional information about ML.Net, WinForms, WPF, Nuget & Roslyn Improvements.

C# 11 is also comming with .NET 7. Here’s a list of all C# 11 features with Examples.

What’s Coming with C# 11 ?

That’s it for the short overview of what’s coming with .Net 7. Thank you for reading. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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