Recently, Microsoft announced that the third preview of .NET 7 is now available. This release brings users enhancements to observability, startup times, codegen, GC regions, Native AOT compilation, and more.
Interested users can download .NET 7 Preview 3 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It has also been tested with Visual Studio 17.2 Preview 3. Microsoft recommends using the preview channel builds to try .NET 7 with Visual Studio family products.
With Native AOT, pre-compilation is brought to .NET desktop client and server scenarios. According to Microsoft, this addition does not serve to replace existing technology, but rather to offer a new set of capabilities that allows users access to new form factors.
This preview release also adds support for new cloud native OpenTelemetry specifications. This includes specification updates #988 and #1708 that make the trace state mutable for samplers.
With this, the latest Managed Extensibility Framework also received a slight update in order to align with the previous version APIs. With the new APIs, a single object instance can be added to the System.Composition.Hosting container.
Startup times are also improved with Write-Xor-Execute enabled. This change also resulted in state performance improvements in some microbenchmarks and a few ASP.Net Benchmarks even when Write-Xor-Execute was not enabled.
In large part, Microsoft credits community contributors for the multitude of optimizations and bug fixes that are included in .NET 7 Preview 3. These include fixes made to code generation and just-in time compilation.
For more information on this preview release, see here.
