Microsoft today announced two major releases: .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022. Both releases have been long awaited and are the result of over a year of development effort.
.NET 6 is a Long-term Support release, which means it will be supported for three years. Microsoft is recommending developers start to migrate their apps to this new version, and believes that the upgrade process is fairly simple from both .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.
This release marks the first time that .NET will be supported on macOS Apple Silicon. It will also be supported on Windows Arm64.
New features in .NET 6 include:
- Hot Reload, which allows code changes to be viewed without needing to restart the app
- OpenTelemetry and dotnet monitor support
- Improvements to Visual Basic in the Visual Studio experience and Windows Form project experience
- The ability to render Blazor components from JavaScript
- WebAssembly AOT compilation for Blazor WebAssembly apps
- HTTP/3 support
- Support for symbolic links in File IO
- Support for OpenSSL, the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme, and runtime defense-in-depth mitigations
- Source generators and analyzers
More information on the latest features in .NET 6 is available here. .NET 6 is supported in Visual Studio 2022, which also was released today.
According to Microsoft, the two main themes of Visual Studio 2022 are developer productivity and quality-of-life improvements.
It includes IntelliCode, which is an AI-assisted tool that can complete whole lines of code and spot repeated edits and suggest similar fixes throughout the codebase.
Visual Studio 2022 also includes Hot Reload, Web Live Preview, and cross-platform testing on Linux.
This release is the first 64-bit version of Visual Studio, which allows it to leverage more modern hardware and reliably scale to more complex projects.
The Visual Studio team is also releasing a preview of the first update to Visual Studio 2022, which is 17.1.
More information about Visual Studio 2022 is available here.
