Microsoft guarantees another 20 years of innovation with the 20th anniversary of .NET.
The first test version of .NET7 is available today for developers to test. You can download the .NET 7 Preview 1 here. This version of the development framework targets containers and cloud-native applications. In the future, Microsoft plans to build containers directly through MSBuild and add more telemetry. The ultimate goal is to make containers more flexible.
The main innovations in Preview 1 are annotation for nullability for Microsoft.Extensions libraries, ARM64 enhancements and tweaks to Hot Reload functionality. The latter is sensitive after Microsoft previously wanted to remove Hot Reload from open source .NET 6 to offer it exclusively from Visual Studio 22. The community screamed blue murder, causing Microsoft to backtrack on that decision.
The first preview is relatively light on new features, but Microsoft is ambitious with a lot of new releases this year to add more functionality.
Migrating from .NET 6 is pretty easy, but we recommend developers wait until the LTS (Long Term Support) version of .NET 7 to make the switch for good. Today, .NET 6 is still supported until November 2024.
Microsoft has tested and approved the code with Visual Studio 17.2 Preview 1 for Windows. Support for .NET 7 Preview 1 on Mac will be rolled out at a later date. More information about all the new features in .NET 7 Preview 1 can be found here.
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