After the official release of .NET 6 in 2021, Microsoft has released another new version of .NET 7 in November 2022.
What’s New in .NET 7 Features and Updates
Microsoft has launched .NET version 7 with an STS (standard-term support) providing only 18 months of support. Considering the new .NET 7 features and updates, it still brings a significant number of changes and .NET 7 performance improvements for the software developers.
Given below are few important updates in .NET 7
Faster, Lighter Apps with Native AOT – Native AOT (Ahead-of-time) is another of the new improvements and novelties that Microsoft brings this time in .NET 7.
AOT is, Ahead-of-time (simply AOT) generates code at compile-time instead of run-time and keeps the code in Native.
On-stack replacement (OSR) – It allows changing the executed code by a way in the middle of its execution. This will help the long-running methods to shift to a faster version in the middle of the execution.
Regex Improvements: Some regular expression improvements which make them a bit better in .NET 7.
Reflection Improvements: Now in .NET 7 the overhead when invoking a member using reflection has been reduced considerably.
Memory Caching Improvements – It is specifically in ASP.NET but this is an improvement in How we do memory caching.
TAR File Creation: .NET 6 already allowed .ZIP file creation but the latest version .NET 7 now allows creating .TAR file for cross-platform APIS.
Complex Authentication Support: Allow creating 8 complex tokens in the backend.
Minimal APIs Improvements – Read this article to know about Minimal APIs Improvements.
Easier upgrading .NET applications – This is very important to create .NET ecosystem. As we all have suffered through it, migrating older or legacy applications to .NET 6 has not been the easiest task.
That’s why Microsoft is bringing new upgrade enhancements for older applications. All of this will come along with the .NET Upgrade Assistant that will greatly help in getting those applications upgraded, saving the developer time.
Upgraded Hot Reload – This is one of my favorite features. You may read here – https://www.sharepointcafe.net/2021/11/dot-net-6.html
System.Text.Json Improvement – System.Text.Json includes a few of small quality-of-life improvements such as JsonSerializerOptions. Patch methods added to System.Net.Http.Json
Single Memory Cache – Now you can instantiate a single memory cache with the AddMemoryCache API.
That’s all for this article. In upcoming articles, we will probably see the .NET 7 feature implementations using C# code.
