Microsoft announces the general availability of .NET 8 with performance and other improvements

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of .NET 8 with thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements. Along with .NET 8, Microsoft also announced several platform and tooling enhancements to improve developer productivity. You can read about the highlights of the .NET 8 release below.

Performance:

• .NET 8 comes with a new code generator called Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that optimizes your code based on real-world usage. Microsoft claims that this feature can improve the performance of apps up to 20%.
• The AVX-512 instruction set support enables parallel operations on 512-bit vectors of data.
• The primitive types (numerical and beyond) now implement a new formattable and parsable interface, which enable them to directly format and parse as UTF-8 without any transcoding overhead.

.NET Aspire:

.NET Aspire is a stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET. .NET Aspire contains a curated set of components that are improved for cloud-native with telemetry, resilience, configuration, and health checks. .NET Aspire helps with the following:

• Orchestration: .NET Aspire provides features for running and connecting multi-project applications and their dependencies.
• Components: .NET Aspire components are NuGet packages for commonly used services, such as Redis or Postgres, with standardized interfaces ensuring they connect consistently and seamlessly with your app.
• Tooling: .NET Aspire comes with project templates and tooling experiences for Visual Studio and the dotnet CLI help you create and interact with .NET Aspire apps.

.NET Container improvements:

.NET image now comes with a non-root user for more security. The .NET SDK tooling publishes container images without a Dockerfile and are non-root by default. Also, the time taken to deploy the .NET apps to containers are faster due to smaller .NET base images.

Blazor improvements:

Blazor in .NET 8 can use both the server and client together to handle all your web UI needs.

AI Development:

.NET 8 brings several improvements to the?System.Numerics?library to improve its compatibility with Generative AI workloads.

Apart from the above, the new .NET 8 release also comes with several other improvements, you can read about them in detail here.