.NET is a free, cross-platform, open source platform from Microsoft that enables developers to build modern applications and cloud services. Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 9, a major major release that comes with a host of performance, security, and functionality improvements.
Microsoft promises significant performance improvements with .NET 9, with more than 1,000 performance-related changes across runtime, workload and language aspects. According to TechEmpower benchmarks, .NET 9 can now handle 15% more requests than .NET 8. The .NET 9 runtime also offers a number of performance improvements, including loop optimization, inlining, Vectorize Arm64 and generate code.
Along with .NET 9, Microsoft also officially announced the release of .NET Aspire 9 with some new features. Developers can now start and stop resources from the console, keep containers running between debugging sessions, etc. The .NET Aspire 9 release also comes with integrations for OpenAI, Ollama, Milvus and many more features for rapid AI development.
ASP.NET Core in .NET 9 comes with improvements to Blazor, SignalR, Minimum API, OpenAPI, and authentication and authorization.
Microsoft recently released Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData to provide a unified C# layer that interacts with AI services, including language models, embeddings, and more.
Microsoft emphasizes that NuGet is the fastest growing package ecosystem year after year. The company recently introduced a new interface for NuGet.org, added dark mode support, partnered with GitHub to add native NuGet support for Dependabot, etc.
Along with the .NET 9 release, Microsoft announced the Visual Studio 2022 17.12 release with significant performance improvements, improved debugging and diagnostics, better integration with .NET Aspire, support for parser support for C# 13, improved Git support, etc
.NET 9 will be supported by Microsoft for 18 months as a standard term support (STS) release. Overall, .NET 9 is a significant upgrade for developers, offering enhanced performance, new tools, and improved support.
You can learn more about .NET 9 performance improvements HERE.
