Chapter 3. Features and benefits
3.1. Current features and benefits
.NET 8.0 offers the following features and benefits.
Runtime and framework libraries
.NET consists of the runtime and the framework libraries as well as compilers, build tools, tools to fetch NuGet packages, and a command-line interface to tie everything together. Benefits include:
- Automatic memory management
- Type safety
- Delegates and lambdas
- Generic types
- Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
- Async programming
- Native interoperability
- Source generators
.NET 8.0 supports developing applications using ASP.NET Core 8.0 and EF Core 8.0, which bring benefits such as:
- Lightweight and modular HTTP request pipeline
- Ability to host on a web server or self-host in your own process
- Built on .NET, which supports true side-by-side app versioning
- Integrated support for creating and using NuGet packages
- Single aligned web stack for web UI and web APIs
- Cloud-ready environment-based configuration
- Built-in support for dependency injection
- Tools that simplify modern web development
3.2. New features and benefits
.NET 8.0 continues to broaden its support and tools for application development in an open source environment. The latest version of .NET includes the following improvements:
- C# updated to C#12
- F# updated to F#8
- Support for building containers: .NET 8.0 includes built-in support for building container images for .NET projects.
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Performance improvements: The new
FrozenDirectoryandFrozenSettypes are optimized for write once, read many (WORM) scenarios, and the newIUtf8SpanFormattableinterface enables writing out a UTF-8 string representation for an object. -
ASP.NET Core 8.0 improvements: Server-side rendering of
blazorcomponents is now possible. ASP.NET Core 8.0 improves the built-in support for inddentity auhtentication and authorization. Minimal API and gRPC applications can now be built withNativeAOT.
