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New Features in .NET 8

Microsoft’s .NET 8 arrived November 14 with a plethora of new features and enhancements. This article discusses the biggest highlights in .NET 8, from my point of view, and includes some code examples to get you started with the new features.

To use the code examples provided in this article, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your system. If you don’t already have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.

Create a .NET Core console application project in Visual Studio

1. Launch the Visual Studio IDE.
2. Click on “Create new project.”
3. In the “Create new project” window, select “Console App (.NET Core)” from the list of templates displayed. Then click Next.
4. In the “Configure your new project” window, specify the name and location for the new project. Then click Next.
5. In the “Additional information” window shown next, choose “.NET 8.0” as the framework version you would like to use. Then click Create.

Garbage collector improvements

The .NET garbage collector now allows you to adjust memory limits dynamically for cloud-native applications. To leverage this feature, call the RefreshMemoryLimit() API:
GC.RefreshMemoryLimit();

JSON enhancements

Several enhancements have been made to the JSON serialization and deserialization functions in .NET. This includes support for floating-point hardware and support for new numeric types like half structs.

Time abstraction

The newly added TimeProvider class and ITimer interface provide time abstraction functionality, thereby allowing you to mock time in test scenarios.

Cryptography enhancements

As cyber threats proliferate globally, new support for SHA-3 support makes .NET 8 applications more secure, providing an alternative to SHA-2. Also in .NET 8, the RSA ephemeral operations have been moved to bcrypt.dll rather than ncrypt.dll, avoiding the need to make a remote procedure call to lsass.exe.

Compression enhancements

Compressing files from a directory using a stream is now possible without having to cache them. This allows direct memory management of the compression result.

Native AOT compilation improvements

Support for native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation was first introduced in .NET 7. With .NET 8, Microsoft has added native AOT support for x64 and Arm64 architectures on macOS.

Code generation improvements

With .NET 8, Microsoft has also made a number of improvements to code generation and just-in-time (JIT) compilation.

Other performance improvements

Performance is an area that Microsoft has focused on more and more in recent releases of .NET.

Further reading

• Microsoft Learn: The Microsoft Learn website has a web page that covers all of the new and enhanced features in .NET 8.
• GitHub documentation: You can also find information about the new features in .NET 8 on the GitHub repository for .NET and .NET Core documentation.
• .NET website: The official website of Microsoft .NET has a web page where you can find more details about .NET 8.
• .NET blogs and .NET community forums: You might want to explore community blogs and forums where developers share their experiences and insights regarding the features and updates in .NET. These platforms are great for finding discussions on what’s new in a particular release of .NET.

Microsoft’s .NET 8 release is a major leap forward in building scalable, secure, robust, and performant applications.

Copright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

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