Microsoft announced another massive update on 8th November 2021. Yes, it was .NET 6 release official announcement. Microsoft officially released .NET 6 in their official blog on 8th November 2021. In this article, I have included some of the important feature highlights that are included in .NET 6 and how to download it, and the supported environments.
.NET 6 Feature Highlights
I have listed only some of the important and useful features that are included in .NET 6, there are many other features that comes with .NET 6, to know more details about all the feature list check the Microsoft official blog.
- Unified Platform Support
- Performance Improvements
- Long Term Support
- Hot Reload Feature
- Introduced C# 10 and F# 6
- JSON APIs
- Minimal APIs
- Support to rendering Blazor Components using JavaScript
- Single Page App flexible pattern.
- HTTP/3 Preview support and Security Improvements
Unified Platform
Same .NET Libraries can use across different platforms like web applications, desktop applications, applications hosted in clouds, mobile applications, and applications for IoT devices. Hence .NET 6 has the ability to share the same codes easily between different applications in platforms.
Performance Improvements
.NET 6 says it improved the performance greatly when compared to the earlier version .NET 5. As Microsoft mentioned they improved the performance, so the project execution time has decreased, improved the latency time, and optimized the memory usage.
FileStream has been completely re-written in .NET 6 as part of async File IO performance improvements.
Long Term Support
Microsoft provides 3-year Long Term Support for .NET 6.
Hot Reload Feature
This is much helpful feature for developers allowed to edit the code at runtime, so developers no need to wait for apps to rebuild, restart, or re-navigate to the same spot where the developer making the code change. This will be possible using dotnet watch command at CLI tool and Visual Studio 2022.
Introduced C# 10 and F# 6
C# 10 focused on the simplification of code, so minimal code to do a program. Three useful new features introduced in C# are,
- Global Using Directives
- File Scoped Namespaces
- Record Structs
F# 6 introduced several new features including Task-based Async to make F# faster and more interoperable, easing the F# tooling to code, pipeline debugging, and numerous performance improvements.
JSON APIs
System.Text.Json provides multiple high-performance APIs for processing JSON documents. Minimal APIs. Developers who want to migrate from NewtonSoft.Json package to System.Text.Json will get more benefits like improved the performance of JSON documents processing and mitigating the blockers.
In .NET 6, Microsoft is including a new source generator as part of System.Text.Json.
Minimal APIs
.NET 6 supports Minimal APIs now.
Minimal APIs are introduced in ASP.NET Core to simplify the getting started experience and improve the performance of HTTP services.
Support to rendering Blazor Components using JavaScript
Blazor components can now render from JavaScript and integrated with existing JavaScript-based apps.
Refer to this article to know more about this,
Single Page App flexible pattern
.NET provides support to build Single page app in ASP.NET Core with Angular, React, Vue, and other frontend JS frameworks. These single-page apps offer more flexible patterns now in .NET 6.
HTTP/3 Preview Support and Security Improvements
.NET 6 now supports HTTP/3 protocol, so HttpClient request/responses can interact with HTTP/3 protocols between clients and servers. But it is in preview mode only.
Also, Security has been improved with support for OpenSSL 3, the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption scheme, and runtime defense-in-depth mitigations, specifically W^X and CET.
How to download .NET 6?
You can download .NET 6 for Linux, macOS, and Windows from this page.
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/6.0
if you have confused about what to download, and to know more about the .NET SDK vs runtime and hosting bundle, check this article.
What Visual Studio Version Supports .NET 6?
Right now, .NET 6 will be supported only by Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio 2022 for Mac. It is not supported by Visual Studio 2019 and below. Also, .NET 6 is supported with the Visual Studio Code C# extension.
