.NET 7 Has Arrived

.NET 7 is out, and it is a pretty significant upgrade. Performance, ASP.NET, MAUI, and C# 11 are some of the new features.

Microsoft continues to improve the performance improvements of .NET. As I have discussed in a previous blog post, Microsoft has needed to improve the cold start performance of .NET for a while. And it sounds like Microsoft has made huge strides in this area with .NET 7.

.NET 7 also includes an update to ASP.NET, the underlying framework that drives much of our .NET web application hosting. These changes primarily affect using ASP.NET as the backend for our APIs.

.NET 7 continues Microsoft’s investment in Blazor. Blazor allows for richer UI interactions like we expect from a Single Page Framework but with a framework that runs on the server. I am excited to give Blazor an honest try. Microsoft continues to invest in Blazor, and it could be in our future as a technology we use for web development.

For me, .NET MAUI is one of the more exciting technologies. The ability to write native applications using C# feels like a great option. I haven’t had a chance to give MAUI a good try. It still feels a little early.

C# is already my favorite language, and it is tough to make it much better. But one new feature is the ability to have abstract static methods. This seems odd, but it would allow you to implement static members on classes that implement an interface. This means we can create interfaces that demand future implementations have very particular static methods. Pretty interesting. I don’t know how I would use this feature in actual code, but it is a pretty interesting concept.

There’s more to talk about with .NET 7, but these are just some of the major enhancements I’m excited to see. What are you excited about? Sound off in the comments below.