.NET 7 is Now Available
At its .NET Conf 2022 virtual event today, Microsoft announced that .NET 7 is now generally available, adding improved performance and new features across the stack.
“.NET 7 brings your apps increased performance and new features for C# 11/F# 7, .NET MAUI, ASP.NET Core/Blazor, Web APIs, WinForms, WPF, and more,” a new post to the .NET Blog explains. “With .NET 7, you can also easily containerize your .NET 7 projects, set up CI/CD workflows in GitHub actions, and achieve cloud-native observability.”
.NET 7 was heavily influenced by community engagement, with over 28,000 contributions by over 8900 contributors through the development cycle. There are also over 330,000 NuGet packages in the .NET ecosystem.
.NET 7 provides native support for Arm64, enhanced support on Linux, and it comes with major releases of Microsoft’s core programming languages, C# 11 and F#7. .NET MAUI is included with .NET 7, and existing frameworks like Blazor, Windows Forms, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) have all been updated with improvements and new features.
.NET is what Microsoft calls a Standard Term Support (STS) release, meaning that it will be supported for 18 months, or until May 2024. By comparison, support for .NET 6 ends on November 12, 2024. (Even-numbered .NET releases are Long Term Support [LTS] releases that are supported for three years.)