New features in modern .NET
If you already have some familiarity with older versions of .NET and are excited to find out about the new features in the most recent versions, then I have made it easier for you to jump around by listing modern .NET versions and their important new features below, along with the chapter number and topic title where you can learn about them.
- .NET Core 1.0, June 2016
- .NET Core 1.1, November 2016
- .NET Core 2.0, August 2017
- .NET Core 2.1, May 2018
- .NET Core 2.2, December 2018
- .NET Core 3.0, September 2019
- .NET Core 3.1, December 2019
- .NET 5, November 2020
- .NET 6, November 2021
- .NET 7, November 2022
- .NET 8, November 2023
Implemented an API suitable for building modern cross-platform apps, including web and cloud applications and services for Linux using ASP.NET Core.
Fixed bugs, increased the number of Linux distributions supported, supported .NET Standard 1.6, and improved performance, especially with ASP.NET Core for web apps and services.
Implemented .NET Standard 2.0, the ability to reference .NET Framework libraries, and added more performance improvements.
Focused on an extendable tooling system, added new types like Span<T>, new APIs for cryptography and compression, a Windows Compatibility Pack with an additional 20,000 APIs to help port old Windows applications, Entity Framework Core value conversions, LINQ GroupBy conversions, data seeding, query types, and even more performance improvements, including the topics listed in Table 7.1:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Spans | 8 | Working with spans, indexes, and ranges |
| Brotli compression | 9 | Compressing with the Brotli algorithm |
| EF Core lazy loading | 10 | Enabling lazy loading |
| EF Core data seeding | 10 | Understanding data seeding |
Table 7.1: Features of .NET Core 2.1
Focused on diagnostic improvements for the runtime, optional tiered compilation, and added new features to ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core like spatial data support using types from the NetTopologySuite (NTS) library, query tags, and collections of owned entities.
Added support for building Windows desktop applications using Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Entity Framework 6.3. Also introduced side-by-side and app-local deployments; a fast JSON reader; serial port access and other pinout access for Internet of Things (IoT) solutions; and tiered compilation by default, including the topics listed in Table 7.2:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Embedding .NET in-app | 7 | Publishing your applications for deployment |
| Index and Range | 8 | Working with spans, indexes, and ranges |
| System.Text.Json | 9 | High-performance JSON processing |
Table 7.2: Features of .NET Core 3.0
Added bug fixes and refinements so that it could be a Long Term Support (LTS) release.
Unified the various .NET platforms except mobile, refined the platform, and improved performance, including the topics listed in Table 7.3:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
Half type |
8 | Working with numbers |
| Regular expression performance improvements | 8 | Regular expression performance improvements |
System.Text.Json improvements |
9 | High-performance JSON processing |
| EF Core generated SQL | 10 | Getting the generated SQL |
| EF Core Filtered Include | 10 | Filtering included entities |
| EF Core Scaffold-DbContext now singularizes using Humanizer | 10 | Scaffolding models using an existing database |
Table 7.3: Features of .NET 5
Added more features to EF Core for data management, new types for working with dates and times, and improved performance yet again, including the topics listed in Table 7.4:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Check .NET SDK status | 7 | Checking your .NET SDKs for updates |
| Link trim mode as default | 7 | Reducing the size of apps using app trimming |
EnsureCapacity for List<T> |
8 | Improving performance by ensuring the capacity of a collection |
Low-level file API using RandomAccess |
9 | Reading and writing with random access handles |
| EF Core configuration conventions | 10 | Configuring preconvention models |
| New LINQ methods | 11 | Building LINQ expressions with the Enumerable class |
TryGetNonEnumeratedCount |
11 | Aggregating sequences |
Table 7.4: Features of .NET 6
Finally unified with the mobile platform, added more features like string syntax coloring and IntelliSense, support for creating and extracting Tar archives, and improving the performance of inserts and updates with EF Core, including the topics listed in Table 7.5:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
[StringSyntax] attribute |
8 | Activating regular expression syntax coloring |
[GeneratedRegex] attribute |
8 | Improving regular expression performance with source generators |
| Tar archive support | 9 | Exercise 9.3 – Working with Tar archives |
ExecuteUpdate and ExecuteDelete |
10 | More efficient updates and deletes |
Order and OrderDescending |
11 | Sorting by the item itself |
Table 7.5: Features of .NET 7
Improved native AOT (ahead-of-time) compilation support, and added some advanced features for library authors related to source generation, including the topics listed in Table 7.6:
| Feature | Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal logger for build output and changed default publish configuration | 7 | Managing projects using the dotnet CLI |
| Simplified output paths | 7 | Controlling where build artifacts are created |
| Improved native AOT support | 7 | Native ahead-of-time compilation |
New Random methods |
8 | Generating random numbers for games and similar apps |
| New array, collection, and span initialization syntax | 8 | Initializing collections using collection expressions |
| Frozen collections | 8 | Read-only, immutable, and frozen collections |
| New data validation attributes | 10 | Using EF Core annotation attributes to define the model |
Table 7.6: Features of .NET 8