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This guide will cover the crucial features you need to know about .NET 8 Before you Delve into .Net 9. Later we will come up with .Net 9 blog which will cover the upgradations that have been done and what makes .NET 9 different from .NET 8.
According to Statista, as of 2024, around 25.2 % of software developers worldwide prefer using the .NET Framework while working on websites and applications for companies a cross scales and sectors, including well-known brands like Samsung, Microsoft, Intel, and JP Morgan Chase. But what makes .NET such a crowd favorite and what does its latest iteration .NET 8 bring to the table?
Read on as we deep dive into the new set of features and improvements available as part of the new version of .NET—everything you need to know about .NET 8.0, with its release date and roadmap, the key features, and performance improvements.
.NET 8 is the most recent version of .NET. The release date of .NET 8 was the 14Th of November 2023. This new version has also been designated as an LTS (Long Term Support) release, so it will receive all these updates, bug fixes, and continuous community support for at least three years from its initial release date.
But what makes .NET 8 so special? Read on!
By .NET development has proven to be the perfect solution for creating applications for desktop, mobile, and even web platforms. With the release of .NET 8 last year, this legacy is about to grow even stronger. Among the most prominent features of .NET 8 is he framework’s faster rendering and performance capabilities, enhancing the user experience beyond previous benchmarks. But that;s not all.
Here is a comprehensive rundown of all the features that. NET 8 brings to the table.
1. C# 12 Code Enhancements
C# 12 provides many significant improvements in efficiency and clarity of the code: Primary constructors can be now applied to any class or struct for a shorter, more succinct syntax. .NET 8 removes the rest of the boilerplate related to initializing fields and properties and gives an even shorter, more expressive syntax to create arrays, spans, and other collection types.
Besides, there is the availability of new default parameter values. This is one situation in which .NET scores over Java. For a competitive analysis between JAVA and .NET, Click here.
Now, one may not have to use method overloading and null checks to emulate named and optional arguments. The using alias directive has been given further utility: now, it is possible to make an alias for any type, not necessarily a named one.
2. Artificial Intelligence Integration
This makes it easier for developers to integrate AI capabilities in the .NET SDK, ensuring easy compatibility with a collection of different tools. Some of the key improvements relate to the System. Numerics library, integrating the Tensor Primitives, especially for Generative AI workloads.
Microsoft, as a part of this journey and recognition of the growing use of AI-powered apps like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure OpenAI, Qdrant, Milvus, and Microsoft Teams, has aligned with the leading names of the ecosystem. This will ensure that .NET developers can easily access this broad set of AI models, platforms, and services through their respective SDKs.
.NET 8 is open-source, and the Semantic Kernel SDK will make these AI components easily integrated into new and existing applications, giving way for innovative user experiences.
To help the developers in their way, Microsoft has already published a number of samples and reference templates with different patterns and practices. Among them are Customer Chatbot, Developing Apps using Azure AI services, and Retrieval Augmented Generation.
Develop feature-rich desktop, mobile and web application with .NET 8
3. Blazor in .NET 8
In .NET 8, Blazor has the whole web UI space covered, with server and client functionalities streamlined together without friction. This full-stack web UI approach has allowed developers to effectively address their web UI needs. The discussion between choosing between .NET and .NET core runtimes has raged for a long time. For our take on the conversation click here for a detailed comparison between .NET and .NET Core.
Always an area of focus toward optimizing page load time, scalability, and improving user experience, Blazor now makes it possible for Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly to be used concurrently under the same application. This dynamic behavior at runtime is what allows it to switch people from server to client virtually. This is particularly significant for WebAssembly-run .NET code with the newly introduced runtime being based on “Jiterpreter” and new built-in components.
But Blazor in .NET 8 goes one step ahead in supporting the complete Blazor-based Identity UI generation for authentication, authorization, and identity management, contributing to enhancement in the overall experience.
4. .NET 8 Container Improvements
Bu teaming up with a .NET development company, you can now safely and easily package your applications with containers offered by .NET 8. Now, every .NET image ships with a non-root user by default, which means more secure containers without having to add such configurations from ground zero. The new .NET SDK tooling also enables you to publish container images even without a Dockerfile, and they will be non-root out-of-the-box.
You can also speed up the deployment of containerized apps using smaller .NET base images, including experimental variants for the smallest app sizes using native AOT. Increase security even more with the newest Chiseled Ubuntu image variants that reduce the vulnerability of your application. Whether you are using Dockerfiles or SDK tooling, building applications and container images for any architecture is now a lot less complicated.
5. Optimized for Better Garbage
One of the newest inclusions in .NET 8 is dynamic memory limits — pretty useful in cases of erratic demand, as could be seen from cloud services. Scaling up and down in response to demand variations is crucial for cost efficiency., furthering the value proposition of opting for .NET development services.
This can enable a service to optimally utilize resources when it senses a decrease in demand, such as to trim back its memory limit. Now, while previously such a change may turn out not to have had an effect as the garbage collector (GC) would still be unaware and could be using a memory limit that is higher than the trimmed value, RefreshMemoryLimit() has been added to the API where you can easily refresh the GC with the new memory limit.
6. JSON serialization and de-serialization
.NET 8 has also enhanced the processing of JSON serialization and deserialization with new support of numeric types, among them, Half Struct. The system works with a kind of IEEE float16, which is useful for providing data to models of machine learning.
.NET 8 also comes with more advanced JSON tooling. It is now easier to write to the particular nodes of a JSON document. In addition, .NET now does a better job in handling JSON content with other features. Generally, the improvements ensure JSON document integrity and make .NET a much better platform for cloud-native development.
.NET 8 brings enhancements in the System.Text.Json Source Generator to close the gap between the reflection-based serializer and the Native AOT experience.
7. Improvements for the JIT Compiler
.NET 8 brings improvements to code generation and JIT, including throughput JIT improvements, SIMD improvements, and Arm64 performance improvements. Moreover, in .NET 8, JIT/NativeAOT now automatically can unroll and vectorize some memory operations with SIMD, like comparison, copy, and zeroing. This optimization will apply in situations when the compiler can determine their sizes at compile time.
In addition to this, dynamic Profiling-Guided Optimization (PGO) is improved and enabled by default. It no longer requires a runtime configuration option to be enabled. Dynamic PGO plays well with tiered compilation by further tuning code optimization using the additional instrumentation added during tier 0.
Dynamic PGO increases performance by around 15%, on average. For a total of almost 4600 tests in an extensive benchmark suite, around one-quarter (23%) saw performance gains on the order of 20% or more.
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8. Methods for Randomness
With custom .NET development, you can now leverage the new tools and services that inject randomness in .NET 8 development, or you can use the results of these programmatic coin flips as a selector in your code. Now, you are able to simply pick things at random from an input collection and fill up some output array.
You can even shuffle the elements of a dataset in random order, which may be very helpful for machine learning models (like separating training and test data each time you build a new chemical model).
9. Cryptography
.NET 8 also adds built-in support for SHA-3 hashing primitives, which require the use of OpenSSL library on Linux (1.1.1+) and Windows 11 out-of-the-box only requiring a minimum version (Build: 25324) to be set up properly.
Now, their SHA-3 versions are available along with the previous ones that have retained a lot of backward-compatible API which was initially providing only SHA-2 functions. This includes:
It’s worth noting that, for at least the near term, most SHA-3 support is likely to be aimed specifically and only at cryptographic primitives; higher-level constructions or protocols (such as X.509 certificates, SignedXml messages, and COSE) may not see such adoption of SHA-3 without further work on ensuring compatibility with a broader range of potential applications.
10. Next-Gen Silicon and Time Abstraction
Some .NET 8 includes silicon advancements, with .NET runtime features aimed at vector acceleration capabilities based on Intel AVX-512. As such, developers can write code to handle this error in .NET 8 based on a new flag: calliToAVXSupport.
Specifically, the Key Features of AVX-512 supported by .NET 8:
Another new feature is time abstraction, a way for developers to set their own local time provider and use it in other timezones outside your current local. It provides control of time zones programmatically and helps in test cases to create mock times easily or debugging issues related to it.
In addition to the features we discussed above, there are also several key performance improvements at the core of .NET 8. From the looks of it, Microsoft has placed substantial emphasis on optimizing runtimes and reducing startup times. Some of the benefits of .NET 8 are-
In summation, .NET 8 is really a stepping stone in the evolution of the .NET platform. The improvements in performance, new cloud-native capabilities, security improvements, support for modern patterns of development result in the creation of high quality applications, without having to invest overbearing fiscal and temporal resources.
Be it cloud-native microservices architecture, cross-platform mobile apps, or secure web applications, .NET 8 is here with the right tools and features that can help you achieve success.
By adopting .NET 8 and following best practices, you would position yourself ahead of many in this fast-evolving software development landscape. It’s a powerful moment to be creating the innovation necessary for today’s digital landscape. Developers also have all reasons to expect more attractive innovations in the next releases of .NET. For now, .NET 8 is probably the strongest and most flexible platform for the future to help your software projects come true.
But wait, for stellar .NET app development, you need the right .Net development outsourcing partner.
Here is where SPEC INDIA steps in. With over 3 decades of experience in the tech sector and over 200+ projects delivered to a clientele spanning 40 countries, SPEC INDIA is your .NET 8 development partner of choice. Want to get started. Click here to peruse through our flexible engagement models, or click here to speak to our experts about your project. As always, stay sharp because with SPEC INDIA, the future is already here!
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