The futuristic software development platform uniting the .NET Framework and .NET Core. Now served at Cubet to create seamless and extensive software solutions for our valuable customers.

The article throws light on the fresh release of .NET 6 by Microsoft. The company consolidates its plan and creates a holistic platform where applications can be developed for any device and operating system. With this core objective, .NET 6 reenters into the market bringing in several new features with an aim to simplify development processes and achieve higher performances.

Let us dive and take a quick glance over the main areas of this recent technology.

Holistic Platform Support

To build a unified platform for the .NET 6, Microsoft had the vision, to begin with, .NET 5. The release of .NET 5 was supposed to unify the successor of several .NET flavors: .NET Framework, .NET Standard, .NET Core, Mono, etc. 

.NET 5 always aimed to be a development platform that can create any sort of application from any business platform. But an important piece of the process was missing here. It was the presence of a unified platform that can create cross-platform UIs.

With .NET 6, you can really create an application you wish to make and run it practically at any place of your choice. It can be desktop, mobile, web, or cloud.

[Source: Microsoft]

Particularly, the new .NET MAUI framework permits you to build desktop and mobile native user interfaces with a single codebase.

[Source: Microsoft]

Simplified Development

The main objective of the .NET 6 release is to offer simplified work features to the developers. There is enough support for the simplified development of the entire platform. However, the three contexts are very exciting: new C# features, Hot Reload support, and minimal web APIs.

C# 10 Features

.NET 6 brings you C# 10 with plenty of new features that help you write code more easily. Let’s take a quick look at a few of them.

Global and implicit usings

As a C# developer, you know how annoying it is to declare the same namespace in every file of your project. Starting in .NET 6, implicit global using directives are added to new C# projects. This means that you can use types defined in these namespaces without having to specify their fully qualified name or manually add a using directive. The implicit aspect refers to the fact that the global using directives are added to a generated file in the project’s obj directory.

Implicit global using directives are added for projects that use one of the following SDKs:

• Microsoft.NET.Sdk
• Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web
• Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Worker
• Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WindowsDesktop

Hot Reload

.NET 6 extends the Hot Reload Feature to the Visual Studio, and almost at any type of project. It allows you to run the application in your development environment. It also allows you to do modifications and apply them without stopping, rebuilding, and rerunning the application.

In the old version of .NET release, the feature of .NET CLI via the dotnet watch was available. With some minor hiccups within the community, now you can avail the Visual Studio 2022 or simply click the button.

Minimal web APIs

The most surprising feature introduced by .NET 6 to simplify your code is minimal web APIs. Along the lines of top-level statements, now you can build a fully working web API application with a few lines of code. Consider the following sample:

//Program.cs

var app = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args).Build();

app.MapGet(“/”, () => “Hello World!”);

app.Run();

This is all the code you need to run a simple Hello World! web API.

If you have some experience building web APIs with ASP.NET Core, you know that you usually need a more articulate project. You need at least a Program.cs file with the setup code for the application, a Startup.cs file where you configure your API, and a controller class defining the API routes and implementing the endpoints.

Performance Improvements

In the previous year, the .NET team had put a lot of effort to improve the platform performances. They tried compiling and execution timing. They also made an effort to reduce memory consumption. The .NET 6 comes with an awesome feature that appreciates all these improvements in several parts of the entire framework. 

[Source: Microsoft]

Other performance improvements include the IO subsystem. For example, the FileStream class was almost completely rewritten with amazing results even with respect to .NET 5, as the following table summarizes for the writing operation:

[Source: Microsoft]

You can check out a detailed report on performance improvements in .NET 6 with related benchmarks for more information.

Summary

The above quick glance of the .NET 6 shows that this is just a consolidation release of the .NET platform. Overall, .NET 6 comes with the main objective to complete the unified platform vision that began with .NET 5. It also improves the internals of the platform to provide the best performance. It begins with the process of development simplification that is going to get extended and upgraded further in the future.

Hope this article helped you understand the importance of creating web solutions with .NET 6 technology. To know more about how it can create a difference in your business, talk to our experts today!