In February, Microsoft revealed some exciting details about an upcoming major update to its open-source framework, .NET 9. The official release is expected in November 2024, a year after the release of the current version of .NET 8. The company will support .NET 9 for 18 months. The technology giant also announced that the first preview of .NET 9 and the third version of .NET Aspire are now available.
.NET 9 prioritises cloud-native and intelligent application development. This focus is accompanied by significant investments in performance, productivity and security. The platform aims to bring innovation at all levels, so developers can have a better experience.
Let's dive straight into the details:
- Cloud-native development takes center stage
With Preview 1 of .NET 9, the platform's focus on cloud development is clear because it improves runtime performance, application monitoring and providing well-defined connections to popular infrastructure and services.
Microsoft's partner teams, Canonical and Red Hat, have developed .NET 9 to work seamlessly across various environments. Areas of improvement include Native AOT and application trimming, enabling optimised production apps across different application types. Azure Container Apps partners are actively scaling .NET 9 apps within Kubernetes-based environments, focusing on the encryption of ephemeral data and enhancing API rate limiting for optimal behaviour.
- Tools for cloud-native developers
.NET 9, in collaboration with Visual Studio, aims to enhance development and deployment experiences for engineers using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, making native AOT code compilation more accessible and expanding its reach to a wider audience.
- .NET and artificial intelligence (AI)
The combination of .NET and AI continues to stimulate curiosity. Over the last year, the platform adopted AI solutions based on Azure Open AI and .NET, with Microsoft Copilot gaining popularity. With .NET 9, the focus is on making AI integration more accessible to developers, with solid libraries and documentation for working with OpenAI and OSS models.