.NET 6 has reached General Availability as of today! That means what’s in is in, and what’s out is out. You can go grab the latest SDK/Runtime from right here : https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/6.0
The official release post is available here : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6/
But of course, I’ll jot down some of the more important cliff notes!
- .NET 6 also includes a myriad of changes to C# 10, many of which are outlined in a previous post here : https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2021/09/23/net-6-c-10-top-new-features-recap/
- Visual Studio 2022 has also been released and is available here : https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
- ASP.NET Core also gets a new release with it’s own announcement here : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-asp-net-core-in-net-6/
- .NET 6 is a LTS, that means 3 years of support. This may not sound much but it is important. .NET 3.0 for example was not LTS and was only supported for 6 months (insane for a major version number if you ask me but anyway…)
- Hot Reload has made it into both Visual Studio 2022 *and* the CLI (For why the CLI is important, see here : https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2021/10/23/the-hot-reload-debacle/)
- .NET MAUI *did not* make it into .NET 6 (Even though many posts reference this). MAUI stands for “Multi Platform App UI”. Essentially the next cross platform UI for mobile and desktop (Xamarin style). Unfortunately I think the team bit off a little more than they could chew, so this will be coming a bit later.
- Azure Functions (If that’s your thing) supports .NET 6 same day. This is actually huge because Azure Functions did not support .NET 5 (Ugh, don’t ask!).
All in all, a pretty solid release going forward. .NET Releases for a while have had little tag lines, and .NET 6 has “The Fastest .NET Yet”. I would say that that’s been an ongoing trend from the .NET team where each release has gotten little tune ups along the way. I’m going to be writing a bit more in the future about some of the lesser known features (For example, Single File Apps got a massive upgrade recently!), but until then dive in and have a peek yourself!
