What’s New in .NET 8: Know The Key Features and Changes

Quick Overview:
Heard of the new .NET 8 release? Well, then, you must be wondering about all the new features and changes. So, if you’re curious to know more about what’s new in .NET 8, you’ve landed at the perfect place. Read on the blog to know more!

Understanding the New Features of .NET 8

If you come from a technical background, there’s no chance that you’ve never heard about .NET. So, .NET is an open-source software framework that is a significant approach to web development, helping revolutionize the digital world. Currently, there are 5,636,856 live websites built with the help of .NET. Woah, it’s good numbers! Organizations prefer using .NET for developing their websites and web apps due to its powerful features and functionalities. Hence, it’s crystal clear why it is the topmost choice for many conglomerates, including a prominent number of Fortune 500 companies. Phenomenal, isn’t it?

Wondering what’s new in .NET 8?

Stress not! Microsoft worked hard to bring the latest .NET 8 features, and we’ve worked harder to curate this article so that you can easily understand what’s new in .NET 8.

So wear your Sherlock hats on and explore the exciting new updates that .NET 8 has in store for us.

New Features of .NET 8

In this section, we’ll talk about the different .NET 8 features that frontend and backend developers are waiting to use. Let’s explore them.

1. The New .NET LTS Release

The next prominent .NET release is due in November 2023, known as .NET 8. It will be an LTS release, which is a long-term support release. Hence, it’s one of the most important .NET 8 features, making it the default version of .NET for multiple organizations and at least for the next three years. No doubt, .NET 7 also brought several changes, and the new release is just built on top of them, bringing the best of .NET 8 features to the world. So, with our years of experience in the technical world, we would suggest you spend a good amount of time with the current .NET 8 preview releases. This will help you understand how the existing codebase ports to the latest version and to define what modifications you might require.

2. JSON Upgradation

This feature is all about how .NET handles JSON serialization and deserialization. All with the new addition to support multiple numeric types also consisting of a new half struct. With the new upgrade, the half-precision numbers can be streamlined more efficiently with the floating-point hardware utilized by NPUs and hardware accelerators. This feature also helps the new numeric instructions that are recently integrated into the Intel processors to use the general-purpose GPU computing tools easily.

Thereby, you can efficiently see that the .NET team has put a lot of effort into the JSON tooling, along with adding better support for new types. The new API approaches now make it quite effortless to write unique nodes to a JSON document, while the other features help enhance JSON content management.

3. Property Serialization from Interface Hierarchies

The grand release of .NET 8 also introduced advanced support for property serialization from interface hierarchies, making it one of the best .NET 8 features. This feature helps in streamlining the complicated data structures by carrying out the inheritance relationships seamlessly, eventually resulting in efficient and concise serialization workflows. And all this while also maintaining code extensibility and clarity. This feature helps boost the code maintenance and data interchange prospects in different application scenarios.

4. Dependency Injection (DI) – A Friendly Metrics APIs

So, when talking about what’s new in .NET 8, you can never forget the grand entrance of Dependency Injection as their friendly metrics APIs. This feature helps with the flawless integration of performance analysis and tracking. This will further empower developers to easily monitor and improve your application health with the help of a modernistic and well-structured metric management system. Indeed, the best! When opting for a .NET 8 download, you’ll adore this feature.

5. DevOps Improvements

DevOps ecosystem is experiencing a boost with .NET 8 changes due to optimized orchestration abilities and streamlined containerization. This is one of the best .NET 8 features, promoting a much more effortless integration of CI/CD pipelines and allowing for more top-notch deployment and better scaling of applications. All this eventually led to an automated and more united development-to-management process. These .NET 8 changes also empower your DevOps teams to deliver the software solution quickly and reliably, adhering to all modern DevOps practices.

6. GetItems() Method

So, imagine a scene where you need specific items to be replaced from a collection proficiently. Just drop in the GetItems() method; it’s quite a powerful .NET 8 feature that facilitates data access. Unlike the conventional techniques used in LINQ loops or queries, the GetItems() method provides a much more direct and simple approach to accessing data elements, eventually helping developers save a lot of their precious time and effort. Whether you need to enhance real-time data retrieval or deal with large datasets, the GetItems() method should be your go-to approach for easily accessing the element in a collection with exceptional effectiveness.

7. Function Pointers Introspection Support

The new .NET 8 feature also includes the introduction of Function Pointers Introspection Support, allowing dynamic analysis and manipulating the function pointers at runtime. It encourages better adaptability and flexibility in conducting any kind of delegate-based operations across the application’s architecture. These are among the few best .NET 8 changes that help empower developers to carry out challenging tasks and operations with more efficiency and precision, in addition to expanding the .NET ecosystem.

8. Dotnet Publish and Dotnet Pack Commands

If you’re part of the technical world, you would understand that deployment and packaging workflow is an important aspect of every software delivery process. Wondering what new .NET 8 changes have to do with it? So, the .NET 8 features have brought some out-of-the-box enhancements to the Dotnet pack and Dotnet publish commands. With the help of streamlined deployment configurations and optimized packaging, software developers can now build production-ready code with exceptional ease.

Hence, the Dotnet pack and Dotnet publish commands are now efficiently equipped to generate self-contained executables, aligning the deployment workflow even more efficiently. This means that applications can now be packaged along with all their dependencies, allowing them to get more independent and portable of the target ecosystem. So, whether you’re sharing apps across different platforms or leveraging cloud infrastructure, .NET 8’s optimized commands make sure that your deployment workflows are reliable, faster, and seamless.

9. Shuffle() Method

Do you know what simulations, games, and randomization algorithms have in common? Think, think! Well, there is always a need for an efficient shuffling system. Welcome to the Shuffle() method! It’s a dynamic .NET 8 feature that provides changeability to the collection’s integrated effortless charm. Moreover, .NET 8’s Shuffle() method feature also makes sure that elements present in a collection are re-ordered randomly. This further provides a nudge of uniqueness into your applications. Hence, from enhancing user experiences to building randomized quizzes, the Shuffle() method encourages developers to optimize their applications with more versatility and simplicity.

In a nutshell, the new .NET 8 features are game-changing aspects for every development process, also bringing a lot to the table.

Leverage .NET 8 for Seamless App Development

With exceptional and powerful .NET 8 changes and the release of new and advanced features, there’s a significant transformation in the world of web development. Hence, in this article, we discussed, reviewed, and learned about the new and major ASP.NET 8 features. You’ll be happy to hear that the .NET community and team are consistently working hard to optimize the tools, frameworks, and runtime. They ensure that the software developers can easily develop and design top-notch applications adhering to multiple circumstances and accomplishing all needs and requirements.

So, are you feeling excited to begin your journey with Dot NET 8? If YES, our experts at Positiwise are always here to help.

Being an expert .NET Development Company, we have a decade of experience and know-how in .NET technology with 50+ professional and certified .NET developers. We have already built 100+ secure and power-packed web, desktop, and mobile applications by integrating the databases and APIs using end-to-end .NET development services to accelerate business success. Consult us today to learn more about our .NET development services.