What you need to know
- Microsoft recently celebrated 20 years of .NET.
- Now, it's announced .NET 7 Preview 1, which is available to download right now.
- .NET 7 is designed to simplify the cloud native app construction experience.
Just a few days after Microsoft celebrated 20 years of .NET, the company announced the release of .NET 7 Preview 1. It's available now, meaning you can dive right in.
Preview 1 features a host of useful items for developers, including "annotations to APIs to support nullability, ongoing JIT compiler optimizations, new APIs, and support for more hot reload scenarios," according to the preview's announcement blog post. The goal of .NET 7 is to make cloud native app development easier than ever in two key ways. As told by the post, expect the latest iteration of the popular software framework to help via:
- Simplifying the setup and configuration necessary to implement secure authentication and authorization
- Improving the performance of application startup and runtime execution.
More features and functionalities will come as .NET 7 progresses, such as the potential ability to directly use MSBuild for container construction. Improved telemetry should help with container observability, and containers images are set to get smaller, faster, and more secure. Rootless and distroless models could also be on the horizon, though Microsoft has only gone so far as to say it's exploring some of these aforementioned requests.
Since .NET 7 is a "Current" release, expect 18 months of free support and patches. You can go to this link for direct access to Microsoft's various .NET 7 Preview 1 download options. It's available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Microsoft hasn't always made developers happy with its .NET 6 decisions, so it's worth keeping an eye on how .NET 7 progresses.
