Microsoft is launching the eighth version of the open source development platform .NET. The update brings improvements in performance, stability and security.

The digital .NET conference is in full swing. There’s no better opportunity to bring a new version of the open source development platform to market, and Microsoft had good news for those in attendance on opening day. .NET 8 is available now and will be supported for three years.

Thousands of improvements

According to Microsoft, .NET 8 includes “thousands of performance, stability and security improvements.” New features in this release include: Dynamic profile-driven optimization Code generator, a set of instructions for parallel operations on 512-bit vectors and primitive types for UTF-8 formatting. .NET 8 should also provide general application performance improvements.

No announcement without generative AI and so this was also taken into account in the new version of .NET. Applications built on the platform can be compiled to native code and LLMs and other AI applications can now also be used on the platform. Finally, cross-platform applications for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android can also be developed in .NET Maui.

More information about the new version of .NET 8 is expected to be discussed during the conference. It can be tracked completely digitally. In addition to a new version of .NET, Microsoft is also launching Visual Studio 17.8.