Microsoft has announced the general availability of .NET 6.0 (opens in new tab) developer platform, along with Visual Studio (opens in new tab) 2022, the all-purpose integrated development environment (IDE) from the Redmond-based company.
Both releases are significant, with .NET 6.0 being the first LTS release of the platform since .NET Core 3.1 in December 2019.
“There are massive gains in performance (opens in new tab), which we’ve seen dropping the cost of hosting cloud services (opens in new tab) at Microsoft. .NET 6 is the first release that natively supports Apple Silicon (opens in new tab) (Arm64) and has also been improved for Windows Arm64.” noted (opens in new tab) Richard Lander, Program Manager, .NET Team, as he revealed the new features of .NET 6.0.
The .NET 6 release includes C# 10 and F# 6, and Lander hails it as a unified platform that enables developers to use one SDK to build apps for multiple platforms such as the browser (opens in new tab), cloud, desktop (opens in new tab), Internet of Things (IoT) (opens in new tab), and mobile.
Visual magic
Visual Studio developers who wish to develop with .NET 6 must upgrade to Visual Studio 2022, since the new .NET platform isn’t supported in Visual Studio 2019.
Visual Studio 2022, which is the first release of a 64-bit version of Visual Studio, brings in several new and useful features (opens in new tab). Of particular interest is the Hot Reload (opens in new tab) feature, which enables developers to edit code while the apps are running.
The feature in fact became a point of contention, when Microsoft suddenly decided to axe it from the open source (opens in new tab) SDK, and instead make it an exclusive Visual Studio 2022 feature. The backlash against the move forced Microsoft to backtrack and reverse its decision (opens in new tab).
Want to code? Check out our roundup of the best laptops for programming (opens in new tab)
