Microsoft announced the launch of its .NET 9 free and open-source development platform, the latest and most advanced version of .NET yet.
With thousands of improvements, including substantial updates across the entire .NET stack, .NET 9 brings you increased productivity, unmatched performance, intelligent features, and enhanced security. Here are the highlights.
Speaking of performance, .NET 9 is the fastest version of .NET yet, featuring over 1,000 performance-related improvements. These changes touch on every aspect of the platformโfrom runtime enhancements to language optimizationsโand deliver substantial gains in speed and efficiency.
Notably, the Server Garbage Collector (GC) has been adapted to better meet applications’ memory requirements, especially in high-core environments, while reducing memory usage by up to 93% in certain benchmarks.
According to developers, they’ve also seen major gains in the TechEmpower benchmark, showcasing a significant 15% jump in request-per-second (RPS) performance. These enhancements make .NET 9 ideal for developers building high-throughput, resource-efficient applications.
Alongside .NET 9, Microsoft is also releasing .NET Aspire 9, a powerful set of tools, templates, and packages designed for creating production-ready applications easily.
With new APIs and features like the ability to keep containers alive between debugging sessions and integrations for platforms like OpenAI and Milvus, .NET Aspire 9 simplifies your cloud app development journey. These features allow you to keep up with the ever-evolving app development landscape while minimizing deployment complexity.
Moreover, .NET 9 makes infusing your applications with artificial intelligence easier than ever. We’ve collaborated with partners across the AI ecosystem, including Azure, OpenAI, Pinecone, and LlamaIndex, to ensure a seamless integration of AI services into .NET.
With new abstractions like Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData developers can easily work with both large and small language models, embeddings, and other AI services to create intelligent applications.
Plus, new building blocks for AIโsuch as enhanced tokenizers and Tensor supportโsimplify the creation of AI-powered solutions. GitHub Copilot has also been enhanced to support developers in debugging, writing code, and handling common workflows more effectively, bringing the promise of AI to your daily work.
It is also worth noting that .NET 9 continues to evolve full-stack web development with ASP.NET Core and Blazor. ASP.NET Core apps built with this version benefit from optimized static file handling, reduced memory usage, and significantly faster startup timesโmaking them secure, efficient, and capable of serving users at any scale.
At the same time, Blazor gets a major upgrade, with performance boosts, a more intuitive reconnection experience for server-rendered components, and improved runtime adaptability to make building beautiful, interactive web apps a breeze.
Lastly, with .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), developers can now easily build apps across mobile and desktop from a single codebase. Additionally, the release of .NET 9 brings increased performance and deeper integration with Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows platform features.
For a deeper dive into all new features, refer to the official Microsoft announcement. .NET 9 downloads are available now, along with updates to Visual Studio 2022 and the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code.
