Microsoft .NET 8 Preview 1 officially released, can be downloaded now

In addition, preview and candidate builds for the new .NET version will also be distributed on a monthly basis. As planned, the final release will come in November at .NET Conf 2023.

Basically, there will be a lot of features and upgrades coming as part of this new version. However, Microsoft's announcement post only outlines some of the changes and additions. Anyway, .NET 8 Preview 1 also includes almost full of remarkable new features that users can experience for themselves right now, such as:

1. Native Ahead-of-Time (AOT): This feature was actually introduced with .NET 7 released last year. However, there will be more improvements from Microsoft, such as the ability to support macOS, as part of the upgrade packages that come with .NET 8. The main focus of the .NET development team is to refine some fundamentals like size. For example, the "Hello, World" application that was released with AOT was half the size using .NET 8 Preview 1 compared to .NET 7.
2. .NET Container image: Preview 1 will include improvements to the usage of container images for .NET applications, including updating the default Linux distribution to Debian 12 (Bookworm). It also includes the option to change the tagging, and the ability for non-root users to use container images.

Speaking about the .NET 8 Preview 1 release, .NET Program Manager Jeremy Likness said:

'.NET 8 Preview 1 is a testament to the power of collaboration between the talented engineers at Microsoft and the highly interactive open source community."

You can download the first preview of .NET 8.0 HERE, and find more details about the release notes as they appear on GitHub.

Lesley Montoya

Update 23 February 2023