On November 10th at .NET Conf 2020, Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 5.0. This much-anticipated release of .NET also includes C# 9 and Arm64 support.

.NET 5.0 is the first major release from Microsoft that finally unified most of their .NET APIs so you can cater to your application more accurately by using only what you need. Therefore, you can eliminate everything else that might hurt performance, security, and stability. .NET 5.0 is now the one-stop-shop for building applications. Just choose your platform, features, and off you go! No need to go through the confusing and drawn-out process of choosing which versions of each package to use since everything is version 5.0.

.NET 5.0 Highlights

Richard Lander, Program Manager of the .NET Team, noted these as notable highlights in this version.

There are many important improvements in .NET 5.0:

• .NET 5.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and Bing.com (version).
• Performance is greatly improved across many components and is described in detail at Performance Improvements in .NET 5.0, Arm64 Performance in .NET 5.0, and gRPC.
• C# 9 and F# 5 offer new language improvements such as top-level programs and records for C# 9, while F# 5 offers interactive programming and a performance boost for functional programming on .NET.
• .NET libraries have enhanced performance for Json serialization, regular expressions, and HTTP (HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2). They are also are now completely annotated for nullability.
• P95 latency has dropped due to refinements in the GC, tiered compilation, and other areas.
• Application deployment options are better, with ClickOnce client app publishing, single-file apps, reduced container image size, and the addition of Server Core container images.
• Platform scope expanded with Windows Arm64 and WebAssembly.

Other luminaries of the Microsoft world have written about their areas of expertise on this release. For example:

• Mads Torgersen, C# Lead Designer wrote about C# 9 and it's new features such as init-only properties, records (oh boy! Is this exciting...), top-level programs, improved pattern matching, target-typed new expressions, and covariant returns, etc.
• Jeremy Likness, Senior Program Manager of the .NET Data team wrote about the new EF Core 5.0 where he highlighted 230+ enhancements, 380+ bug fixes, and revamped documentation.
• Daniel Roth, Principal Program Manager in the ASP.NET team wrote about what's new in ASP.NET Core 5.0. There is a lot of good news on this front: MVC now supports C# 9 record types and model binding improvements; Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly support and improvements, built-in OpenAPI, and Swagger UI support for Web APIs. SignalR Hub filters and parallel Hub invocations, Azure AD authentication, HTTP/2, gRPC performance improvements, and much more.
  

There is so much to explore in this release that a single blog post would not be enough. You can download .NET 5.0, for Windows, macOS, and Linux, for x86, x64, Arm32, Arm64. Visual Studio users will need Visual Studio 2019 16.8 or later on Windows and the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac on macOS. The C# extension for Visual Studio Code already supports .NET 5.0 and C# 9.

At CSW, we have been experimenting with .NET 5.0 for some time! That means we are more than ready to help you migrate your applications. As a Microsoft Gold-certified partner, our team of experts is your best bet to gain significant performance and security improvements (by simply using the new platform version, to start!). We'll help you find your path to success when implementing .NET 5.0 in your organization, with our custom .net development. Just let us know how we can help you.

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