What I’m Excited to See in .NET 8

.NET has evolved a lot since I first started using it years ago. I was introduced to it when it was released in 2002, but I wasn’t using it regularly until I started working at a new company in 2005.

Microsoft recently announced the availability of .NET 8. This version of .NET is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, so it will have a longer lifetime for us than .NET 7 or .NET 9 will. But I have found that these release cadences probably are not important as sometimes we make them out to be. .NET doesn’t tend to have huge breaking changes, so migrations should be easy.

Here are some of the .NET 8 features I’m most excited to use:

• Improved Performance – Each new version of .NET boosts performance, and it seems like .NET 8 continues this tradition. Its new code generator, Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), optimizes our code based on real-world usage. Microsoft claims it can improve app performance by up to 20%.
• Blazor – Updates to this part of .NET are some of what I’m most interested in. While I haven’t done much work with Blazor yet, I love the promise of how it could change how we do web development. Instead of building SPAs (Single Page Applications), we could return to a more traditional Blazor. This might be a faster development model, and first page loads might be faster since you wouldn’t have to download all the bootstrapping required for an SPA.
• MAUI – This is another of the .NET technologies I have high hopes for. MAUI is Microsoft’s cross-platform UI framework. It allows us to use C# to write iOS and Android applications. This could be a huge win for us. I have tried to use MAUI, but my previous attempts didn’t go well. With the release of .NET 8, I’ll give it another try.

The updates we’ve seen over the years have been pretty positive for the .NET community. With the exception of some of the early .NET Core releases, .NET has been in a continual state of progress. And that goes for C#, too. And the .NET 8 release continues that tradition and looks to be another solid release.

What are you most excited about in .NET 8? Sound off in the comments below.