Microsoft has released the .NET 9 with new enhancements that can support users in adding apps with AI and building a unified platform. The new .NET 9 is termed as the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant by Microsoft. It comes with thousands of improvements in performance, security, and functionality.
Microsoft .NET 9.0 is now generally available for download
Microsoft’s new .NET 9, released, has many improvements over its predecessor .NET 8. It’s built with a focus on performance and cloud-native apps. .NET 9 will be supported for 18 months as standard-term support. Below are some of the new implementations on .NET 9.
.NET runtime
The .NET 9 runtimes have a new attribute model for feature switches with trimming support. It makes it easy to define feature switches that libraries can use to toggle areas of functionality.
The runtimes include numerous improvements in performance like loop optimizations, inlining, Arm64 vectorization, and code generation.
.NET libraries
The .NET libraries include many new libraries. System.Text.Json adds support for nullable reference type annotations and exports JSON schemas from types. New libraries like CountBy, AggregateBy, GroupBy, etc., are included with performance improvements.
.NET SDK
The .NET 9 SDK comes with a workload sets feature where all the workload stays in the single, specific version until you manually update it. A dotnet tool install option, lets users select the tools that are allowed to run on a newer .NET runtimes version. .NET SDK comes with features including Unit testing with better MSBuild integration, NuGet security audit, terminal logger, New MSBuild script analyzers, etc.
AI building blocks
.NET 9 has a new unified layer of C# abstractions via Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData packages. These abstractions enable the interaction with AI services including small and large language models.
.NET Aspire
To make it easier to build observable and production-ready apps, .NET Aspire has powerful tools, templates, and packages with improvements to the dashboard and resource lifecycle management. It brings more flexibility in development by enabling the addition of new integration and APIs during development.
There are other new improvements like ASP.NET Core for security and support, .NET MAUI for multi-platform support and enhanced performance, reliability, and deeper integrations, EF Core, C# 13, F# 9, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows Forms. Microsoft has confirmed it in its blog about .NET 9.
Download .NET 9.0
You can download the new .NET 9 from Microsoft.
