It feels like just last month .NET 6 Preview 1 was released…. In fact it was! Such is the cadence of releases with .NET now, they are getting pumped out at blazing speed. It means that each release only has marginal improvements each time, but it also means that you can grab the preview versions and actually start playing with features (and providing feedback) at a pretty crazy pace.
You can grab .NET 6 Preview 2 here : https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/6.0
Now as for what’s new, in short :
- A key focus of .NET 6 is improving the developer experience by way of speeding up the feedback process of the tools you use every day. In Preview 2, that means showing off vastly improved build times across a range of projects (MVC and Blazor), in some cases cutting the build time by over half! If you are someone like me that runs a project using “dotnet watch”, then it’s great to see improvements in this area.
- Further improvements to .NET Multi-platform App UI (Or MAUI for short), which means single project developer experiences not only across mobile platforms like Android and IOS, but even Mac OS too!
- System.Text.Json now has a feature to “IgnoreCycles” which acts similar to the Newtonsoft.Json.ReferenceLoopHandling. This may sound like a small feature, but it’s actually been highly requested for a very long time now! For more information on what this fixes, we have a great article on it here : https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2020/03/15/fixing-json-self-referencing-loop-exceptions/
- Implementation of “PriorityQueue”. This is massive and a much needed enhancement! It allows developers to create a queue, but give each item in that queue a priority. On Dequeue, items with the highest priority are popped first. This will replace a tonne of custom coded “Queues” that are really un-performant lists in the background!
The full release notes as always is here : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6-preview-2/
Overall, those same minor improvements we’ve come to expect each release. But for me, the addition of the PriorityQueue is really great to see. Expect a blog post coming your way soon on the topic!
