The first preview of .NET 8 has been announced, with a focus on cloud-native and cross-platform development with MAUI and Blazor.

.NET was created from a combination of .NET Framework and .NET Core. NET 8 is a long-term support (LTS) release and will be supported for three years after initial release.

The cross-platform focus builds on the inclusion of .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) SDK and Visual Studio tooling support that was introduced in the lifetime of .NET 7, along with Blazor. .NET MAUI provides a framework for creating native apps for mobile and desktop devices that run Android, iOS, macOS and Windows with a single C# codebase. Blazor can be used to build hybrid apps with Razor UI components for accessing native device platforms and be shared across mobile, desktop, and web.

New in this preview is a preview version of Native AOT for MacOS. The first NativeAOT features were shipped in .NET 7 and targeted console applications. Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation is designed to improve the performance of .NET applications by creating a fully self-contained version of your app that doesn’t need a separate runtime because everything is included in a single file. As of preview 1, this single file is smaller, and Linux builds are now up to 50% smaller.

.NET Container images are another area to have been improved. The preview has a more modern default Linux distro with Debian 12, and you can run container images with non-root users. The .NET team says that while container base images are almost always configured to run with the root user, it is not always the best approach. However, they acknowledge that it is time consuming to configure each application to have a different user, and container images do not come with a non-root user that is appropriate for container workloads. In .NET 8, all container images published will be non-root capable.

.NET 8 Preview 1 is available for download now.

More Information

.NET 8 Preview 1

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