Microsoft launches .NET 8 with enhanced performance, security, and AI integration features

Microsoft has announced the release of .NET 8, the most recent Long-Term Support (LTS) version of their development platform. This update includes thousands of enhancements for performance, stability, and security, as well as platform and tooling improvements aimed at increasing developer productivity and accelerating innovation.

Among the performance enhancements, .NET 8 introduces a new code generator, Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), which optimizes code based on real-world usage. This feature, enabled by default, can potentially boost app performance by up to 20%.

.NET 8 also supports the AVX-512 instruction set, allowing for parallel operations on 512-bit vectors of data. This feature enables processing of larger amounts of data in less time. The platform's primitive types now implement a new formattable and parsable interface, facilitating direct formatting and parsing as UTF-8 without transcoding overhead.

Developers will benefit from performance improvements in Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) apps when using .NET 8 on Linux and Windows platforms. This eliminates the need for Just-In-Time (JIT) compiling at runtime.

Alongside .NET 8, Microsoft is launching the first version of .NET Aspire, a stack specifically designed for creating cloud-based apps.

Furthermore, .NET 8 simplifies the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into your apps via first-class AI features in the .NET SDK and compatibility with several tools.

Finally, .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) provides a unified project system and codebase for building applications for WinUI, Mac Catalyst, iOS, and Android. Experimental native AOT now supports targeting iOS-like platforms. A new Visual Studio Code extension for .NET MAUI equips developers with the tools necessary for creating cross-platform .NET mobile and desktop apps.