Microsoft .NET 7 enters release candidate phase

.NET 7, the next generation of Microsoft’s cross-platform, open source developer platform, has reached the release candidate (RC) stage.

.NET 7 emphasizes performance along with capabilities such as .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), cloud-native development, and support for the ARM64 small form factor. Regarding performance, .NET 7 is being called the fastest .NET yet, with more than 1,000 performance-impacting improvements, Microsoft officials said in a September 14 blog post. Performance boosts range from loop optimizations to faster startup time, and also extend to reflection, native AOT (ahead-of-time compilation), and the ARM64 processor platform.

For .NET MAUI, .NET 7 provides a single project to handle multi-targeting across devices and their platforms. MAUI features a UI stack that targets Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Tizen to complement the .NET SDK and base class library.

The first .NET 7 RC is downloadable from dotnet.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It follows seven preview releases.  A second RC also is planned, with the  production release due in November.

For cloud-native development realm, .NET 7 brings built-in container support for the .NET SDK. Also highlighted is gRPC JSON transcoding, an extension for ASP.NET that creates RESTful HTTP APIs for gRPC services. gRPC enables high-performance communication between apps, using HTTP/2, streaming, binary serialization, and message contracts to build real-time services.

.NET 7 RC 1 has been tested with the Visual Studio 17.4 Preview 2 IDE. .NET 7 is not a long-term support release; it will receive free support and patches for 18 months from the release date. .NET leverages technologies ranging from ASP.NET Core framework for building cloud-based web applications to the Blazor client web apps tool to the C# and F# languages.