Microsoft will release .NET 8 on the occasion of .NET Conf 2023 from Nov. 14 to 16. Because it is an LTS version, support will continue for three years.
The themes for .NET 8 include Cloud Native, Blazor Full Stack, .NET MAUI and Intelligent Apps with .NET. The release of this version therefore represents a treasure trove of new features, including ahead-of-time compilation for macOS. The size of AOT-compiled Linux apps is also said to have decreased by 50 percent.
Blazor changes
ASP.NET Core 8 gets several improvements with the update. These include automatic reconnect for the real-time messaging library SignalR.
For Blazor, a framework that allows Web applications to be written in C# and in HTML, there is a new server-side rendering (SSR) mode. From now on, a Web page can be updated without the DOM (Document Object Model) needing to be re-rendered. Thus, the application should feel like a Single-Page App (SPA) even though it uses SSR.
Since an SSR-rendered component is not interactive, Blazor has come up with an alternative to make things easier for users. Individual page components can now be made interactive with a Server or WebAssembly render mode. This can even be modified at runtime. However, DevClass discovered that there are users who find Blazor’s large number of updates so overwhelming that it causes confusion.
MAUI
There are also significant innovations for Multi-platform App UI (MAUI). This framework is suitable for both desktop and mobile applications. With version 8, an extension is now available for Visual Studio Code, so it now supports development on Windows, macOS and Linux. AOT support will also eventually arrive here for macOS, but that is still under development. Again, users seem to mainly want more reliability, as each version so far has had “new regressions.”
Preview 6 of .NET 8 is available for download here.
Also read: Microsoft introduces first preview .NET 8