Microsoft launches the .NET 8 developer platform with .NET Aspire

The new version of .NET 8 not only includes many performance improvements, but also adds a new code generator called Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). Microsoft revealed these improvements will increase the performance of applications built with .NET 8 by up to 20%.

In a blog post, Microsoft said:

The AVX-512 instruction set, now supported, allows you to perform parallel operations on 512-bit data vectors, meaning you can process more data in less time. Primitive data types (numeric and more) now implement a new formatable and parsable interface, allowing them to format and parse directly as UTF-8 without any requirements. Any code conversion request?

Microsoft launches the .NET 8 developer platform with .NET Aspire Picture 1

Microsoft says TechEmpower Benchmarks show that in the JSON and Fortunes API, .NET 8 performance increases by 18% and 24%, respectively, compared to .NET 7. Since this is a platform developed by Microsoft, it The company is perfectly capable of promoting the use of .NET 8 for AI-based applications on its own.

We've collaborated with many internal and external partners, such as Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Search, Milvus, Qdrant, and Microsoft Teams, to ensure .NET developers can easily access models, various AI services and platforms through their respective SDKs.

Microsoft launches the .NET 8 developer platform with .NET Aspire Picture 2

AOT (ahead-of-time) applications will also see increased performance when developed in .NET 8 and used on Linux and Windows platforms. That means developers won't have to use a JIT (just-in-time) compiler to load applications at run time.

In addition to launching .NET 8, Microsoft also released the first version of .NET Aspire, designed to support the creation of cloud-based applications. Microsoft says it uses various components such as telemetry, resiliency, configuration, and health checks by default. Developers can learn more about .NET Aspire in this dedicated blog post, and can submit feedback on the preview version at GitHub

Kareem Winters

Update 16 November 2023