Let’s Explore The New, Faster Microsoft .NET 7

Great news for developers! The Microsoft .NET Framework has received an upgrade, as the tech giant has finally rolled out the .NET 7. The new release of the company’s open-source, cross-platform software development environment comes with a number of exciting new features and enhancements to ensure faster start-up times, shorter compilation times, and better performance overall. It packs everything from C# language upgrades and container-based development capabilities to a complete roster for cloud-native application development.

Can’t wait to dig through the new .NET 7 features? Let’s explore everything new in Microsoft .NET 7 and explore some of its key features and capabilities in detail.

What’s New In .NET 7?

There’s a lot to cherish in Microsoft .NET 7 for developers, as the platform brings a lot of new capabilities. Probably, the biggest headline it makes, however, is that it unifies various development products into a single .NET framework moving forward.

It’s a consistent app development model that runs flawlessly on just about any device. It includes tools and libraries for various programming languages, including Visual Basic and C#. With the new and improved development framework, you can develop better-performing apps using a plethora of new features for C# 11/F# 7, ASP.Net Core/Blazor, NET MAUI, WinForms, WPF, Web APIs, and more.

Upgrading to the .NET 7 Framework will allow developers to containerize their apps and set up CI/CD workflows in GitHub actions. It will also make cloud-native app development simpler than ever.

5 Key .NET 7 Features To Look Forward To

While there are plenty of new features and capabilities introduced with the new .NET 7 platform, here we have listed five of the most impactful feature upgrades worth discussing.

Native AOT (Ahead-of-Time)

Native AOT is one of the new .NET 7 features, and it has received all the attention from Microsoft lately after being started as an experimental upgrade. Basically, it’s a compilation strategy in which the code is generated in the compilation phase and not at runtime.

Apps start executing once the executable code is loaded into the memory by the OS. The upgrade has optimized application data structures so that they run AOT-generated code instead of compiling it from scratch at runtime. Native AOT outperforms various other methods of translation by ensuring smaller application file sizes and faster start-up times among other things. As the compilation process begins, Native AOT starts generating code, but in native. It’s a great advantage for apps and environments that require very quick start-up times.

Extensive Support For Cloud-Native Application Development

With the newer and more efficient .NET 7, cloud-native app development has become easier than ever. The platform allows you to securely connect to data services while also encrypting your connection strings in Azure Key Vault or a private user file.

LINQ queries allow you to integrate your applications with other sources of data and quickly extract the content of JSON documents from SQL Server. It implies you can directly build your apps into a container image.

Developers have to write just a few lines of code for delivering secure JSON documents with authenticated endpoints through Minimal’s APIs. The idea is to make cloud-native application development easier through more streamlined authorization and authentication.

.NET Multi-Platform App UI (.NET MAUI)

Another salient feature of .NET 7 is the .NET MAUI that helps simplify native .NET UI development with cross-platform support. It brings amazing new capabilities, including support for the new SDK tooling versions, improved internal development loop performance, faster app start-up times through optimized memory usage, and the ability to share code across multiple platforms.

The stable release of the .NET MAUI is available as part of Visual Studio 17.4. It addresses feedback issues besides offering new features to assist desktop developers. The quality of widgets has been improved, and there are a few fixes for UI elements such as lists, buttons, and layouts. The .NET MAUI Map control also offers cross-platform compatibility, with support for pins, customized pins, and drawing lines and polygons.

Improved Blazor/ASP.NET Core

The .NET 7 comes with many changes made to Blazor for improved performance. WebAssembly is now supported by default, which means you don’t have to set up the development environment or install dependencies. The default settings also extend support for secure HTTPS connections, with the ability to use the latest Firefox and Chrome versions.

Besides offering support for .NET Core 2.2 to enable cross-platform compilation to WebAssembly through Mono/.NET Core, it comes with Blazor Hybrid support as well to allow developers to take existing components and integrate them into a desktop app through a web view control with access to hardware APIs.

With Blazor Hybrid Support, developers can also design consistent user interfaces regardless of the platform. You can use exactly the same HTML/CSS code base for developing desktop and browser-based applications. In addition, Blazor helps developers create desktop applications that may be able to use different functionality of the user’s computer, like using the webcam or reading files.

Upgrading Assistance

Upgrading to the latest version of .NET has previously been quite complex, but not anymore. The Microsoft Upgrade Assistant now supports more use cases, allowing developers to easily upgrade their existing .NET applications.

The improved Upgrade Assistant offers insights, automation, and guidance to assist developers in upgrading their legacy code to .NET 7. The application compatibility framework and upgrade assistant combine to significantly reduce update time for legacy applications.

Other Key Highlights of Microsoft .NET 7 Improvements

Here are some other key highlights of the improvements introduced with Microsoft .NET 7:

A single Base Class Library (BCL)
Improved .NET support for Linux systems
Native support extended for ARM64 systems
HTTP/3 and improved minimal APIs for cloud-native applications
Continuous performance improvements

Conclusion

There’s a lot to cherish for .NET developers with this new release of the .NET 7 platform. It’s a viable solution for futuristic software development thanks to its improved features. Besides all the feature improvements, however, it’s even more exciting that the framework will keep evolving in the years to come. Microsoft aims to keep its development platform relevant for many more years, and it’ll keep on introducing new features to give developers access to the most cutting-edge development tools going ahead. Want to test .NET 7 framework? Download and install the most recent Visual Studio preview now!

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