As we all know .net7 was released in early November 2023 and will be supported until mid-May 2024 with .NET 8 LTS expected to come out in November 2023. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's offerings with this new release.

.NET 7 now allows for one base class library with Api's that can be used across different types of applications in the .NET suite including desktop, web and mobile applications as well as cloud, AI and IoT. A list of all Api's can be found here: https://apisof.net/catalog

Performance gains are notable, runtime cache efficiency gains combined with improvements to libraries to use hardware-agnostic intrinsic benefits all platforms, and more so those running ARM64 architectures.

More tools for cloud-native applications, improved container support and more Microsoft Orleans features being added to the ASP.net tool chain aim to improve scalability, flexibility and performance of applications using .NET 7.

Application developers can do more while doing less with more developer focused tools including an improved upgrade assistant, developments in .NET MAUI and the long awaited hot reload feature. Container-first workflows and more Git-hub action integrations allow for simpler and more effective CI-CD pipelines as well.

Expansions in Web-Assembly support in .NET 7 translates to richer integrations for JavaScript-based and Blazor apps allowing developers apps to reference and re-use .NET libraries from JavaScript via JavaScript inter-op to optimize interactions between the two languages.

This all falls within Microsoft's theme of unification that the .NET team has focused on with this new release. So, is it worth the shift? Upgrading long running commercial projects are often large and complex endeavors and can balloon to a myriad of problems if not managed effectively, In the next article we will be looking at upgrade and migration strategies, focusing specifically on Microsoft LTS releases.