Microsoft.NET 7 enters the release candidate phase

Microsoft’s November platform upgrade will bring performance improvements, multi-platform targeting and cloud-native programming.

.NET 7, Microsoft’s next-generation open source platform for developers, has entered the release candidate stage (RC).

.NET 7 emphasizes performance and capabilities, such as NETMAUI (Multi-platform App UI), cloud-native development and support for the ARM64 smaller form factor. Regarding performance, .NET 7 is being called the fastest .NET yet, with more than 1,000 performance-impacting improvements, Microsoft officials said in a September 14 blog post. The performance boosts include loop optimizations and faster startup times. They also include reflection, native AOT (ahead of time compilation), and the ARM64 processor platform.

.NET 7 is the single project that can handle multi-targeting across platforms and devices for.NET MAUI. MAUI includes a UI stack for Android, iOS and macOS. It also supports Tizen. This is in addition to the.NET SDK, base class library, and.NET SDK.

The first.NET 7 RC can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com. It is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. It is the seventh preview release. The production release is due to be released in November.

.NET 7 provides cloud-native development support with built-in container support via the.NET SDK. ASP.NET’s gRPC JSON Transcoding extension creates RESTful HTTP APIs to support gRPC services. gRPC enables high performance communication between apps using HTTP/2, streaming and binary serialization. It also uses message contracts to create real-time services.

Visual Studio 17.4 Preview 2, IDE has been used to test.NET 7RC1. .NET 7 RC 1 has been tested with the Visual Studio 17.4 Preview 2 IDE. It will not be a long-term support release. However, it will continue to receive free support and updates for 18 months. .NET uses technologies such as ASP.NET core framework for building cloud-based applications, the Blazor web apps tool, the C#, and the F# languages.