The coolest new features in .NET 6

With the release of Microsoft.NET 6, a new era of high-performing, reducing applications for the web, cloud, desktop, and mobile platforms have begun. Here is what’s new.

• The.NET unification that started with.NET 5 has occurred in Microsoft.NET 6. Cross-platform.NET 6 integrates the SDK and runtime for desktop, mobile, web, and cloud applications by utilizing the.NET Core,.NET Framework, and Xamarin/Mono technologies into a single.NET Framework.
• On November 9, 2021, Microsoft made.NET 6 broadly accessible, along with C# 10 and Visual Studio 2022. In addition to providing a better overall development experience,.NET, 6 offers considerable performance improvements over its versions—the fastest.NET version to date is.NET 6. Additionally, because it is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Microsoft will continue to support.NET 6 for three years.

Be aware that Visual Studio 2022, including Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, supports.NET 6. However, neither Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac 8, nor MSBuild 16 are compatible with.NET 6. If you want to use.NET 6, you must update to Visual Studio 2022.

What’s new in .NET 6

Now let’s discover the.NET 6 updates and new features.

• Improved performance

Performance has significantly improved, specifically for file I/O, which has a major impact on execution time, latency, and memory use. For better async file I/O, the FileStream class has been updated. Because blocking APIs is no longer required, the Windows implementation is considerably better.

• Profiling-based optimization

The JIT compiler may produce optimized code based on the types and codes that are most often used according to the profile-guided optimizes (PGO) method, a new feature added in.NET 6.

• Support for unified platforms

With the release of.NET 5, Microsoft launched a single platform for.NET apps. The goal was to provide a standardized platform for app development that would work with any hardware and any operating system.

• New APIs are released

There are around new APIs for HTTP/3, JSON, math, and other things.

• Security updates

Significant security improvements have been made, including runtime mitigations for “defense-in-depth,” support for the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption algorithm, and OpenSSL.

• Improvements in C# 10 and F# 6

Record structs, implicit utilizing, and new lambda capabilities are just a few of the significant upgrades in C# 10. Improvements made to F# 6 have included Task-based async and pipeline debugging.

• Improvements in JSON APIs

JSON API updates offer new features and improved results. The introduction of JSON has made it possible to produce the necessary serialized code at build time and eliminates the requirement for runtime reflection and code development.

• Improvements in cloud diagnostics

With the integration of OpenTelemetry and dotnet-monitor, which are available through Azure App Service and are currently in production, cloud diagnostics have been improved.

• Improvements in code quality

You may now build better, safer, and quicker code with the help of source generators and analyzers.

• Hot Reload

One of the most notable new features included in.NET 6 is Hot Reload. When your application is running, you may use this functionality to update the user interface. You don’t need to restart the application to see the changes take effect when you save them. The productivity of developers is significantly increased by this feature.

• DateOnly and TimeOnly structs

This is a much-needed addition to. NET. Now you may assign values to objects that are simply dates or times. Some examples that show the use of DateOnly and TimeOnly structs are provided below.

var dateNow = new DateOnly(2021, 11, 17);
var newDate = dateNow.AddDays(7);
var timeNow = new TimeOnly(12, 0, 0);
var newTimeNow = timeNow.AddHours(5);

• Support for async streaming

IAsyncEnumerableT>, which is supported by.NET 6, enables async streaming, allowing you to stream data from the server without any buffering.

• Targeting .NET 6

The TargetFramework node in Visual Studio 2022 should relate to.NET 6 when you create a new.NET 6 application. This is how a typical.csproj file created with.NET 6 will look likely:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

If you’re looking for a specific operating system, you can additionally specify a version of.NET 6:

• • • net6.0-android
    • net6.0-ios
    • net6.0-maccatalyst
    • net6.0-tvos
    • net6.0-windows