Microsoft .NET 7 zeroes in on containers and cloud

Microsoft has released a preview of .NET 7, the planned next version of the company’s .NET software development platform, with the promise of improved support for cloud-native and container scenarios.

Major focus areas for .NET 7 include better support for cloud-native scenarios, along with tools that make it easier for developers to upgrade legacy projects and to work with containers. .NET 7 also promises developer experience improvements such as simplification of setup and configuration for secure authentication and authorization, and improving application startup and runtime execution.

.NET 7 Preview 1 includes annotations to APIs to support nullability, new APIs, ongoing JIT compiler optimizations, and support for additional hot reload scenarios. Published February 17, the Preview 1 can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. The general release of .NET 7 is expected in November. .NET 7 builds on the foundation of .NET 6, which arrived in November 2021 and includes a unified set of base libraries, runtime, SDK, and a simplified development experience.

Releases of .NET include libraries, runtime, products, and tools, with multiple teams collaborating within and outside of Microsoft. As part of the .NET 7 development effort, Microsoft plans investments in technologies including ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Entity Framework Core, WinForms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and other platforms.

Microsoft, in noting the 20^th anniversary of the .NET platform on February 13, said the .NET 7 Preview would be arriving this week. With Current Release status, .NET 7 will receive free support and patches for 18 months from the release date.

Microsoft this week also released MAUI (Multi-app UI) Preview 13. The company is focused on shipping .NET MAUI support for .NET 6, with a release candidate due soon. Afterward, MAUI will be included in .NET 7. Also released this week were ASP.NET Core Preview 1 and Entity Framework 7 Preview 1.