The .NET Framework is Microsoft's comprehensive and consistent programming model for building applications that have visually stunning user experiences, seamless and secure communication, and the ability to model a range of business processes.
Elevate your app development with .NET 8. All-new upgrades include performance boosts, ASP.NET Core enhancements, and .NET MAUI platform and stability improvements. Supercharge your .NET applications by infusing AI and build cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire, the new, simplified stack for production-ready distributed applications.
With this release, .NET reshapes the way we build intelligent, cloud-native applications and high-traffic services that scale on demand. Whether you're deploying to Linux or Windows, using containers or a cloud app model of your choice, .NET 8 makes building these apps easier. It includes a set of proven libraries that are used today by the many high-scale services at Microsoft to help you with fundamental challenges around observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and more.
This SDK includes:
- .NET Runtime 8.0.0
- ASP.NET Core Runtime 8.0.0
- .NET Desktop Runtime 8.0.0
Language support:
- C# 12.0
- F# 8.0
- Visual Basic 16.9
What's New
Complete release notes here.
Unparalleled Performance – Experience the fastest .NET to date
.NET 8 comes with thousands of performance improvements across the stack. A new code generator called Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that optimizes your code based on real-world usage is enabled by default and can improve the performance of your apps up to 20%. The AVX-512 instruction set, which is now supported, enables you to perform parallel operations on 512-bit vectors of data, meaning you can process much more data in less time. 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.
Every year we talk about the performance gains across .NET. This year we continue our quest to push the performance of .NET to new heights. From the latest TechEmpower benchmarks with .NET 8, we're seeing improvements in the JSON API scenario of 18%, hitting nearly one million requests per second with ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs.
The Fortunes scenario is closer to a real-world workload, including database access and server-side HTML rendering. In this test, we see an even larger improvement of 24%, now over 300K requests per second with ASP.NET Core.
.NET Aspire – An opinionated stack to build observable, production-ready cloud-native applications
.NET Aspire is a stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET. It includes a curated set of components enhanced for cloud-native by including telemetry, resilience, configuration, and health checks by default. Combined with a sophisticated but simple local developer experience, .NET Aspire makes it easy to discover, acquire, and configure essential dependencies for cloud-native applications on day 1 as well as day 100. The first preview of .NET Aspire is available today.
.NET 8 Container Enhancements – More secure, compact, and productive
Package your applications with containers more easily and more securely than ever with .NET. Every .NET image includes a non-root user, enabling more secure containers with one-line configuration. The .NET SDK tooling publishes container images without a Dockerfile and are non-root by default. Deploy your containerized apps faster due to smaller .NET base images – including new experimental variants of our images that deliver truly minimal application sizes for native AOT. Opt-in to even more security hardening with the new Chiseled Ubuntu image variants to reduce your attack surface even further. Using Dockerfiles or SDK tooling, build apps and container images for any architecture.
