This past week, NET 7 Preview 1 was released! By extension, this also means that Entity Framework 7 and ASP.NET Core 7 preview versions shipped at the same time.
So what’s new? In all honesty not a heck of a lot that will blow your mind! As with most Preview 1 releases, it’s mostly about getting that first version bump out of the way and any major blockers from the previous release sorted. So with that in mind, skimming the release notes I can see :
- Progress continues on MAUI (The multi platform UI components for .NET), but we are still not at an RC (Although RC should be shipping with .NET 7)
- Entity Framework changes are almost entirely bugs from the previous release
- There is a slight push (And I’ve also seen this on Twitter), to merge in concepts from Orleans, or more broadly, having .NET 7 focus on quality of life improvements that lend itself to microservices or independent distributed applications (Expect to hear more about this as we get closer to .NET 7 release)
- Further support for nullable reference types in various .NET libraries
- Further support for file uploads and streams when building API’s using the Minimal API framework
- Support for nullable reference types in MVC Views/Razor Pages
- Performance improvements for header parsing in web applications
So nothing too ground breaking here. Importantly .NET 7 is labelled as a “Current” release which means it only receives 18 months of support. This is normal as Microsoft tend to alternate releases between Life Time Support and Current.
You can download .NET 7 Preview 1 here : https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/7.0
And you will require Visual Studio 2022 *Preview*!