Microsoft.NET7 Latest Features Update

Microsoft releases the latest version of .NET every year in November. .NET 6 came on November 8, 2021. And exactly a year later, the company released .NET 7, a more unified, modern, more straightforward, and quicker version of its predecessor. Microsoft will support it.NET7 for 18 months as a standard-term support (STS) release. The updated .NET7 offers various latest features. Let’s look at seven vital ones.

1. Inbuilt Container Support

Containers prove an effective mechanism for many businesses when it comes to cloud deployment. But working with containers puts more tasks like creating and publishing images, ensuring security and compliance, and increasing image speed. .NET containers enhance the experience, making it more seamless.

2. System. Text.Json Serialization

.NET7 comprises enhancements to the System. Text.Json serialization across multiple areas, including the following.

• Contract customization enables a higher degree of control over serialization and deserialization.
• Polymorphic serialization for user-defined type hierarchies
• Support for required members that are properties that have to be present in the JSON payload to enable deserialization

3. Mathematical Operations

The new .NET7 and C# 11 allows mathematical operations. For instance, if you intend to write a method that adds two numbers, earlier, you had to add an overload for every method type. But now, you can write a single, generic method where the parameter type is constrained to be a number-like one.

4. Native AOT (Ahead-of-Time)

The experimental Native AOT is Microsoft’s primary focus of development. Native AOT generates code at compile time but in Native. The most prominent advantage is improved performance, predominantly in memory usage, start-up time, access to restricted platforms, and disk size.

5. Enhanced Observability

Another noteworthy area of improvement is that of observability. It helps you understand your app’s state as it scales and with an increase in technical complications. NET. 7’s observability implementation is mainly built around OpenTelemetry. Some of the improvements include the following.

The new Activity.CurrentChanged event that companies can use to detect the event of changes to the span context of a managed thread.

The new, performant enumerator methods for Activity properties – EnumerateTagObjects(), EnumerateLinks(), and EnumerateEvents().

6. P/Invoke Source Generation

The source generator for platform invokes (P/Invokes) in C# is another significant introduction in .NET7. It looks for LibraryImportAttribute on static, partial methods to enable compile-time source generation of the marshaling code. The generation prevents the need to generate an IL stub at run time, as it does while using DllImportAttribute. The benefit of the source generator is that it enhances application performance and enables the AOT compilation of the application.

7. Central Package Management

NuGet’s central package management (CPM) feature allows you to manage common dependencies in your projects from a single location. You can enable it by adding Directory.Packages.props file to your repository root.

In the file, set the MSBuild property ManagePackageVersionsCentrally to true and add versions for common package dependency by using PackageVersion items.

Further, in the individual project files, you can remove Version attributes from any PackageReference items, referring to centrally managed packages.

So, that was about some of the important and latest feature updates of .NET7. Upgrade to .NET7 and enhance your use of the .NET development platform. Datafortune can help. Our proven expertise across the Microsoft suite of products enables you to seamlessly upgrade to the latest versions and leverage them fully and relevantly in your business’s context. Connect with us at info@datafortune.com to know how we can help you make the most from .NET7.