The .NET development team and the entire .NET community are celebrating 20 years of Microsoft’s Development Framework for enterprise applications. Today, more than five million developers are using .NET and this is a celebration of all of you. It’s amazing that a 20-year-old platform has been the most beloved framework for developers for three years in a row now – 2019, 2020, 2021, according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, said Beth Massi, Chief Marketing Officer , .NET.
Microsoft .NET is the name given to a set of computer products and technologies from Microsoft to make applications easily portable over the Internet. The development team for .NET, Microsoft’s development framework for enterprise applications, announced on November 8 the release of .NET 6. According to Microsoft, the CNCF has recognized .NET repositories in the top 30 fastest-velocity open-source projects on GitHub since 2017, which is a testament to all the people who are actively improving the platform every day. Welcome to .NET 6. Today’s release is the result of just over a year of effort by the .NET team and the community. .NET 6 is the first release that natively supports Apple Silicon (Arm64) processors and has also been enhanced for Windows Arm64, said Richard Lander, program manager on the .NET Core team.
Microsoft has always had deep roots among developers. The company was born out of DOS and BASIC, and by the 90s it had an extensive portfolio of development tools, with many different tools and languages to create many types of applications. Each tool was effective in solving different problems. However, the applications had trouble communicating with each other, especially between the machines.
With the rise of the internet, the world has seen an easier way to share information. Technology moved towards distributed systems that communicated over the Internet. .NET was designed for this Internet revolution. Multiple languages, a single runtime, and a set of compatible libraries and APIs. .NET was at the forefront of Microsoft’s transformation to embrace the Internet age.
.NET 6 RC1 has been tested and is supported by Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4. In .NET version 6, cloud diagnostics have been improved with dotnet monitor and OpenTelemetry. WebAssembly support is better. New APIs have been added, for HTTP/3, JSON processing, math, and direct memory manipulation. The team added initial support for Arm64 with .NET Core 3.0 and Arm32 before that. The team has made major investments in Arm64 in each of the latest versions. In .NET 6, it mainly focused on supporting new Apple Silicon chips and x64 emulation scenario on macOS and Windows operating systems Arm64.
The Arm64 is generating a lot of excitement right now, whether it’s for laptops, hardware, and other devices. We feel that same excitement in the .NET team and do our best to keep up with this industry trend. We work directly with engineers from Arm Holdings, Apple and Microsoft to make sure our implementations are correct and optimized, and that our plans align. These close partnerships have helped us a great deal,” emphasizes Richard Lander.
It is possible to install the versions Arm64 and x64 of .NET on macOS 11+ and Windows 11+ Arm64 operating systems. To achieve this result, the .NET development team had to make several design choices and modify their products to make it work. By default, if a .NET 6 application is running with the SDK Arm64, it will run in Arm64. It is possible to easily switch the execution to x64 with the argument -alike dotnet run -a x64. The same argument works for other CLIs.
As soon as I started playing with .NET, I was hooked. From then on, I dedicated my career to sharing my knowledge and love for .NET. I had the pleasure of working at Microsoft for almost 15 years now and always with .NET. Over the years, I’ve seen .NET innovate constantly. It’s not just regarding the great engineers at Microsoft. The feedback and help from the developer community has been key to its success, says Beth Massi.
When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time to open source, .NET was also at the forefront. In 2012, the company fully released the ASP.NET MVC web framework and is accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft’s first major open source projects at the time. In 2014, with support and contributions from the open-source community, Microsoft began building a cross-platform, open-source .NET on GitHub. She released the first version at the Red Hat DevNation conference in 2016 and demonstrated how it works on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
We just released .NET 6 in November 2021 and we are building .NET 7 full speed ahead, Microsoft says. In fact, .NET 7 Preview 1 is announced for this week. .NET 6 is the fastest-adopting version of .NET to date. .NET 6 is truly the fastest .NET to date, says Alex Yakunin, CTO at ServiceTitan, a software technology platform. According to Yakunin, .NET 6 brings up to 40% speed boost over .NET 5. On November 9, Microsoft announced .NET 6 as the fastest release to date with support for Apple Silicon chips, Process-isolated Windows containers and improved file I/O.
Source : Microsoft
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