New in .NET 8.0 [1]: Start of the new blog series

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New in .NET 8.0 [1]: Start of the new blog series

With this post I am starting a new blog series about .NET 8.0. Like last year on .NET 7.0, I will present the innovations in .NET 8.0 in numerous smaller articles.

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Dr. Holger Schwichtenberg is Chief Technology Expert at MAXIMAGO, which offers innovation and experience-driven software development, including in highly critical safety-related areas. He is also head of the expert network www.IT-Visions.de, which supports numerous medium-sized and large companies with advice and training in the development and operation of software with 43 renowned experts.

.NET 8.0 and Visual Studio 2022 v17.8 are available. .NET 8.0 has been available free of charge on the download page since November 14, 2023. For .NET 8.0, developers need the Visual Studio 2022 development environment at least version 17.8.

Still flawed

According to Microsoft, a production-ready release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 was also released on November 14, 2023. Unfortunately, Visual Studio version 17.8 is still very unstable, so developers often read “Visual Studio ran into an unexpected problem with one or more projects. You may need to reload affected projects or the solution to prevent further problems.”. The first three updates up to 17.8.3 have already been released. In recent years, Visual Studio has always needed a few updates like this in the third place to get things running smoothly.

Typical error messages in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 (Fig. 1)

(Image: Screenshot from Microsoft’s Visual Studio)

But the .NET 8.0 runtime environment is not yet free of bugs. During my detailed practical tests while writing my three books on .NET 8.0, I managed to cause the current web browsers Chrome, Edge and Firefox to hang with one line of .NET program code.

Official name

As with .NET 6.0/C# 10.0 and .NET 7.0/C# 11.0, Microsoft uses a notation without “.0” in some places (.NET 8/C# 12) and with (.NET 8.0/C# 12.0) in others. I will consistently use the notation “.0” as it appears on the download page (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: .NET 8.0 download page

(Image: Screenshot from Microsoft’s download page)

Support for 36 months – except for .NET MAUI

.NET 8.0 was developed in the last 12 months. Since then, Microsoft has released seven preview versions and two release candidate versions. While the previous version 7.0, released in November 2022, only received 18 months of support and will therefore only be provided with updates until May 2024, Microsoft is offering updates and technical help for .NET 8.0 for a period of 36 months, i.e. until November 2026 at. However, an exception applies to .NET MAUI: Microsoft again only offers 18 months for this.

Content of the blog series

My series will cover these aspects of .NET 8.0:

New language features in the C# 12.0 programming languageNew features in the Software Development Kit (SDK) in .NET 8.0New and extended classes in .NET 8.0

Goals of the blog series

My contributions do not claim to replace or surpass the documentation. Readers can see my articles as an inspiration to decide whether an innovation makes sense for their use cases and then want to take a closer look at it.

I will write the articles in the series far enough in advance to ensure weekly publication. However, due to editorial bottlenecks, it may happen that no article appears for a week.

(rme)

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