Microsoft today announced the release of .NET 8 Preview 1, its next long-term support (LTS) release of the open-source developer platform.

“Welcome to .NET 8!” Microsoft’s Jeremy Likness writes in the announcement post. “.NET 8 preview and release candidate builds will be delivered monthly. As usual, the final release will be delivered sometime in November at .NET Conf.”

Some of the key themes in this release include:

.NET MAUI. Microsoft’s new cross-platform app solution will offer improvements for those upgrading from Xamarin Forms, faster UI rendering, and built time and hot reload improvements.

Native AOT. Microsoft shipped the first native Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation capabilities for Windows and Linux console applications only in .NET 7, and this feature is coming to macOS in .NET 8 Preview 1 (and to ASP.NET Core at some point). AOT reduces memory footprint, startup time, and battery life.

Blazor United. This new effort will let Blazor developers create a single project with server-side rendering and client-side interactivity with Blazor Server or WebAssembly.

You can download .NET 8 Preview 1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.