Today, during the virtual summit .NET Conf, Microsoft announced the availability of its updated cross-platform framework .NET Core 3.0. This release is packed with improvements, new features and advanced support. 

The biggest changes in 3.0 include:

  • .NET Core 3.0 has already been battle-tested and will soon be deploying on large workloads
  • Performance has been enhanced across many components
  • C# 8 comes with added async streams, range/index, more patterns and nullable reference types
  • F# 4.7 features improvements with working with implicit yield expressions and syntax relaxations
  • .NET Standard 2.1 increases set of types available to use in code
  • Windows Desktop apps are now supported
  • .NET Core apps have executables by default
  • High performance JSON APIs
  • Garbage collector updated to use less memory by default 
  • .NET Core has been hardened for Docker
  • Support for Raspberry Pi and ARM chips
  • .NET Core 3.0 will be superseded by .NET Core 3.1, which is expected to be released with long-term support in November
  • .NET Core 3.0 available with RHEL 8

“.NET Core 3.0 is a major new release of .NET Core, and includes a vast set of improvements. We recommend that you start adopting .NET Core 3.0 as soon as you can. It greatly improves .NET Core in many ways, like the massive reduction in size of the SDK, and by greatly improving support for key scenarios like containers and Windows desktop applications,” Richard Lander, program manager for the .NET team at Microsoft, wrote in a post. 

The company also revealed more plans for .NET 5, which is expected to launch next year. This next major version of the  .NET Platform will feature one base class library and support all .NET workloads. Additionally, it will come with Just-in-Time and Ahead-of-Time compilation models and offer one unified toolchain. 

Other announcements during the virtual summit included Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 and Visual Studio for Mac version 8.3.