.NET 7 is available. Microsoft released the latest version of. NET on 8th November i.e. .NET 7.
I will cover a lot of questions in this article, .NET is a huge platform. I'm going to give you an overview on .NET 7 and support lifecycle of this version.
There are a few things you should be aware of. First, if you want to improve your C# skills, you should visit this website csharp.com. This is the place to learn C# and other technologies with free resources.
This website has a lot more articles, blogs, videos, forums, and interview questions to help you out.
Please share free content with your friends, colleagues etc. so that everyone can have a broad knowledge of C# and other technologies.
I am going to cover below mentioned questions in this article.
- What are the improvements for ASP.NET Core?
- What are the improvements for Entity Framework Core?
- What are the interesting changes in .NET 7 and C# 11?
- How long will .NET 7 be supported?
- Is .NET 6 still supported?
- Should I move to .NET 7?
- Where can I get more information?
.NET 7 is the fastest .NET. It has over 1000 performance impacting changes, including reflection. There are noticeable performance improvements for ARM64 devices. Updating to.NET 7 might be a game changer if you want to spend less money on your application operating in the cloud or use less resources to run your .NET application locally.
![]()
Image source:- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core
.NET 7 provides more control and customization options in System.Text.Json (What's new in System.Text.Json in .NET 7) We have additional control over serialization thanks to.NET 7 contract customization. There are a lot of performance improvements and improved extensibility.
The most recent C# (csharp) version is C# 11, which is compatible with.NET 7. The file scope types, generic math support, UTF-8 string literals, raw string literals, needed members, and generic attributes are the most important new features in C# 11.
What are the improvements for ASP.NET Core?
- Improved tool support and a better debugging experience with Blazor Webassembly (wasm).
- A new low-level.NET/JavaScript interop is available that is independent of the Blazor UI component concept.
- A mechanism to handle location-changing events, such as leaving a page, is now supported by the navigation manager. We may conveniently notify the user of unsaved work before they leave a page.
- Additionally, the rate limiting middleware has improved. There is an enable rate limiting attribute that allows rate limiting on an end point. While Blazor Webassembly appears to be the focus of many enhancements, other areas have been improved.
- In SignalR hubs, dependency injection is now possible.
- We can create better Open API specifications by adding summaries and descriptions to basic APIs.
- ASP.NET Core 7 also has HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 improvements.
What are the improvements for Entity Framework Core?
- Entity Framework Core 7 comes with performance improvements.
- Interceptors that have recently been added allow VF core operations to be modified and suppressed.
- We can query, filter, and sort JSON content by mapping to JSON columns.
- We also get new execute update and execute delete methods that allow us to bulk update database rows without loading them into memory first.
- Support for value objects when using domain-driven design.
- We also get more customization options for the model building conventions and added support for the stored procedures for insert, read, update, and delete.
- We get many query improvements for example a better translation of GroupBy and GroupJoin queries and other general performance improvements.
.NET MAUI provides a single project that handles multi targeting across devices such as Android, iOS, Smartphones, Tablets as well as Windows and Mac OS desktop applications.
The windows package manager (winget) now supports installing, uninstalling, and updating .NET from command prompt or PowerShell
What are the interesting changes in .NET 7 and C# 11?
Regex (regular expression) improvements
Some things to make regular expressions a little better in. NET 7. To just general speed improvements .NET 7 is faster than .NET 6, which is faster than .NET 5, which is faster than .NET Core 3.1. It's always getting better but with that we have some new features like regular expression improvements.
Simplified LINQ Ordering
We have some simplified LINQ Ordering. It is a nice feature improvement.
Reflection Improvements
We have improvements in reflection better in. NET 7
App trimming improvements
When you build your applications, you can trim out all the stuff you don't need all the parts of. NET that isn't relevant to your specific application and that makes for a smaller application (smaller .exe file) there are some improvements to app trimming, specifically in trimming libraries so that the library you depend on that class library. You can also trim based upon which exe is using that DLL.
Microseconds and Nanoseconds to TimeStamp, DateTime, DateTimeOffset, and TimeOnly
There are some improvements with DateTime where we have the ability get microsecond and nanosecond values in DateTime, which allows four more specific timing values coming out of the DateTime object.
namespace System
{
public struct DateTime
{
public DateTime(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond);
public DateTime(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond, System.DateTimeKind kind);
public DateTime(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond, System.Globalization.Calendar calendar);
public int Microsecond { get; }
public int Nanosecond { get; }
public DateTime AddMicroseconds(double value);
}
public struct DateTimeOffset
{
public DateTimeOffset(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond, System.TimeSpan offset);
public DateTimeOffset(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond, System.TimeSpan offset, System.Globalization.Calendar calendar);
public int Microsecond { get; }
public int Nanosecond { get; }
public DateTimeOffset AddMicroseconds(double microseconds);
}
public struct TimeSpan
{
public const long TicksPerMicrosecond = 10L;
public const long NanosecondsPerTick = 100L;
public TimeSpan(int days, int hours, int minutes, int seconds, int milliseconds, int microseconds);
public int Microseconds { get; }
public int Nanoseconds { get; }
public double TotalMicroseconds { get; }
public double TotalNanoseconds { get; }
public static TimeSpan FromMicroseconds(double microseconds);
}
public struct TimeOnly
{
public TimeOnly(int hour, int minute, int second, int millisecond, int microsecond);
public int Microsecond { get; }
public int Nanosecond { get; }
}
}
Memory caching improvements
This is specifically in the ASP .NET core section, but this is improvements in how we do memory caching.
Tar file creation and extraction
We can create zip files inside out .NET, but now you can create and extract tar files so if you need a tar file for whatever reason you want to tar file. We can now create and extract tar file very easily. My upcoming article on this “How we can create and extract tar file.” It is super simple with the help of a couple of lines of code. You've taken your files and compressed them into one tar file or you can extract tar file at a particular location.
// Generates a tar archive where all the entry names are prefixed by the root directory 'SourceDirectory'
TarFile.CreateFromDirectory(sourceDirectoryName: "/home/dotnet/SourceDirectory/", destinationFileName: "/home/dotnet/destination.tar", includeBaseDirectory: true);
// Extracts the contents of a tar archive into the specified directory, but avoids overwriting anything found inside
TarFile.ExtractToDirectory(sourceFileName: "/home/dotnet/destination.tar", destinationDirectoryName: "/home/dotnet/DestinationDirectory/", overwriteFiles: false);
Blazor Changes
There are tons of blazer changes. Blazor has more area of focus and it is not because MVC and Razor pages are not being updated. They definitely are. It is just that there are more features in Blazor, which is still getting lots of new stuff. We also have improvements to navigation. There is a loading progress bar in blazor WebAssembly (wasm). There are virtualization improvements, so you can put more things on the screen faster and see a more responsive website. Imagine if we have 4000 questions in forum section, we only load about 30 on the screen and yet the scroll acts as if we can scroll through all 4000 questions, and as you scroll it loads more in the background. That makes for a much more efficient loading mechanism, so there are some improvements to virtualization. Passing state is another thing, custom elements improvements. There is lots of cool stuff in Blazor that will cover a lot of things in my upcoming article on this.
Minimal APIs improvements
There is output caching middleware. There's rate limiting, there is ability to upload files and minimal API and so much more. Route filter handling improved dependency injection. A whole bunch of cool stuff. There is also some stuff in ASP .NET core in general such as nullable models for MVC and Razor pages. Some other stuff will pull again as well. There is a lot of changes, especially in the API when it comes to .NET 7.
Almost everybody can probably take advantage of right away in their code.
What about support window?
Because the question always comes up. Should I deal with .NET 7 or wait and skip it? There is some confusion that comes out. When it comes to the two different types of versions of .NET.
.NET 7 is an STS Version (standard term support) which means it is supported for 18 months.
Does that mean it is not supported?
- No, it means it is fully supported, and fully production ready.
- Yes, you can use it in production.
- Yes, you can use it in a real application.
- Yes, it is fully supported by Microsoft.
It is just that the support window is 18 months is the shorter version. Microsoft has a concept of long-term support that's .NET 6 currently. A long-term support version of. NET is supported for a total of 3 years; .NET 6 was released in November of 2021 .NET 6 still has two years of support left.
And if you notice the pattern in past released on .NET versions, there is an LTS every two years and there is an STS every two years. So, .NET 6 LTS, which means .NET 8 will also be LTS.
Beyond that we can use .NET 6 after their support period, but the recommendation is to stay within a supported version. Right now, we have two supported version .NET 6 and .NET 7.
.NET 5 is no longer supported by Microsoft. You can still use it, but it is not supported.
Should I move to .NET 7?
You should upgrade to it and my answer is it depends on what your organizational values are and how big your application is, and you know how long it is going to take to upgrade in .NET 7..
The upgrade process is not difficult to go from .NET 6 to .NET 7, but it is not difficult. Doesn't mean there is not a lot of testing that has been done validation and verification. For you to move to that version, the same thing is true for all your dependencies. If your dependencies are ready to move the next version before you move to the next version, and that is a cascading problem that can be difficult to manage so the less dependencies you have. This is better when it comes to how rapidly you can move to the new version, but it's up to you if you want to stick with .NET 6 or if you want to move .NET 7, but both are fully supported production Ready versions.
We can predict out of the future based on the past release of .NET. Every year .NET releases an updated version in the month of November. Based on this pattern .NET 8 will be coming out November of 2023 and .NET 10 will be coming out November of 2025 so, we know what the pattern is going to be at least until Microsoft decides to change. But for now, that's the pattern they are sticking to and focusing on for the future.
Both LTS and STS are fully supported production-ready versions.
Where can you get more information?
- csharp.com for more information about all technologies, here authors demonstrate how to use them, when to use them, why to use them, and so on.
- c-sharpcorner conference is a place where we can get more information as well, that's the conference from C# Corner. It is organized every year. It goes over all the cooler things with some cool demos, specially focused Microsoft technologies.
- follow C# Corner on twitter for quick updates. It is also a good place to know more about latest updates in all technologies.
- There is a csharp.live where csharpcorner recap all information.
- For official updates from Microsoft that there is .NET blog has been blogging about all the changes through all the versions of .NET to see the differences.