Microsoft has put out the first preview release of .NET 6 in its continued efforts to transform the once Windows-only .NET framework into a modern open source cross-platform product.
.NET 6 will continue the unification work to bring all things .NET under one unifying umbrella, that they couldn’t complete during the development of the previous .NET 5 framework. Microsoft’s goal is to have a unified framework that developers can utilize across multiple platforms.
“.NET 6 will enable you to build the apps that you want to build, for the platforms you want to target, and on the operating systems you want to use for development,” wrote Richard Lander, the Program Manager of the .NET team.
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All-in-one framework
As he discussed the new features of the preview release, Lander noted that the unification efforts will help all kinds of app developers, irrespective of whether they are developing for the desktop, mobile or for the cloud. Lander pointed out that “a big change this release is fully integrating Android and iOS as part of the existing Xamarin workloads."
With the .NET 6 release, Lander’s team will specifically focus on app performance, while adding new control themes, and improving developer experiences.
Some of the work towards these objectives have been introduced with .NET 6 Preview 1 release. These include Blazor desktop, which is often described as an off-shoot of ASP.NET, and allows developers to write rich web UI using HTML, CSS, and C# instead of JavaScript.
There are lots of other improvements in .NET 6 including support for Apple Silicon. Lander’s post touches on the various improvements and new features and also has links to download .NET 6 Preview 1 for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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