The First Preview of .NET 9 is Available

15 February, 2024

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Microsoft has shared some details about what’s new in .NET 9. A few months ago, the company released .NET 8, and although .NET 9 isn’t expected to be out until later this year, it’s already clear what improvements and updates to expect.

The tech giant also announced that the first preview of .NET 9 and the third preview of .NET Aspire are now available.

Microsoft has indicated that the main areas where improvements will be made are cloud application development and artificial intelligence applications.

“We’ve spent the last several years building out strong cloud native fundamentals, like runtime performance and application monitoring. We will continue that effort. We’re also turning our focus to delivering paved paths to popular production infrastructure and services, for example running in Kubernetes and using managed database and caching services like Redis,” the .NET team at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

To improve application performance in the cloud, the company is working on Native AOT. Despite its advantages, Native AOT requires the use of many tools that developers don’t normally work with, making it inaccessible.

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code will include .NET Aspire, a cloud application development suite. New enhancements will be related to component configuration, debugging, integration with the developer dashboard.

The company is also working with its Azure Container Apps partners to ensure that .NET 9 applications can easily scale into their Kubernetes environments.

.NET 9 will also include features that allow developers to incorporate artificial intelligence into their applications.

In addition, Microsoft will continue to improve the libraries and documentation for the OpenAI and OSS models, as well as the workflow for Semantic Kernel, OpenAI and Azure SDK.