Issue: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0

Rod Paddock argues that .NET 7 advances the platform with strong developer-centric improvements across languages, frameworks, and tooling. He highlights C# 11 features like raw string literals, MAUI’s strengthened cross-platform capabilities, and Blazor's expanded interoperability and hot-reload experience. He emphasizes sustained performance gains, and valuable EF enhancements that streamline data-centric development. Paddock frames these updates as part of a coherent f...orward and backward-compatible trajectory, designed to meet developers where they are and preserve prior sweat investments while enabling new capabilities. The result is a highly productive, future-proof .NET ecosystem.See More

In "What’s New in .NET 7," Jon Douglas highlights the latest .NET release focusing on significant performance improvements, enhanced cloud-native capabilities, and developer productivity boosts through features like C# 11, .NET MAUI, and built-in container support. The article emphasizes easier modernization of legacy apps, optimized ARM64 performance, enriched observability, and the introduction of Native AOT for faster startup and smaller deployments. Jon conveys that ....NET 7 builds on prior unification efforts to empower developers to build any application across platforms with improved runtime, libraries, and tooling, making it Microsoft's fastest and most versatile .NET release yet.See More

Bill Wagner explains that C# 11 organizes its advances around four themes—improved developer productivity, object initialization and creation, generic math support, and runtime performance—with the first two likely most impactful in everyday code. He surveys features such as raw string literals, newlines in interpolations, UTF-8 string literals, pattern matching on Span, and list patterns to make code more concise and readable; plus required members, auto-default structs..., extended nameof scope, and generic attributes to improve object initialization. He also highlights runtime-focused enhancements like ref fields, file-local types, and cached delegate conversions that boost performance.See More

Stephen Toub surveys the standout performance gains in .NET 7, arguing that no single change dominates, but a collection of targeted innovations—most notably on-stack replacement (OSR) for tiered JIT compilation, a Regex source generator that delivers compile-time equivalents of compiled regexes without JIT, and extensive vectorization in LINQ and core APIs—collectively yield substantial speedups. He illustrates how OSR accelerates loops, how compile-time regex generatio...n aids environments without JIT, and how fixed-width vectors unlock dramatic throughput, urging developers to adopt .NET 7 and measure gains.See More

David Ortinau argues that .NET MAUI lets .NET developers build high-performance, native-feeling mobile and desktop apps from a single multi-targeted project, reusing existing .NET skills and libraries, simplifying resources, lifecycle, and platform integration, and enabling Blazor hybrid UI, strong tooling (hot reload, Live Preview) and enterprise patterns to accelerate cross-platform app delivery with no compromise.

Shawn Wildermuth argues that middleware—long a core of ASP.NET Core—can and should be leveraged with Minimal APIs, not just controllers. He explains how middleware works, how Minimal APIs opt into it via fluent extension methods (e.g., RequireAuthorization, AllowAnonymous, RequireCors, Produces, WithName), and demonstrates common patterns for CORS, Swagger/OpenAPI metadata, and caching. When a middleware doesn’t natively support Minimal APIs, attributes remain a fallback.... Wildermuth’s goal is to show how to compose middleware with Minimal APIs to enrich functionality while preserving simplicity.See More

Julie Lerman surveys EF Core 7’s notable advances—focused on substantial performance optimizations, true bulk ExecuteUpdate/ExecuteDelete, JSON column mapping, stored-procedure mapping, new interceptors (including materialization), richer provider-specific aggregates, improved convention customization, and greater EF6 parity—arguing these features make EF Core 7 a faster, more flexible, and production-ready platform worth adopting even on .NET 6 LTS.

Mike Rousos surveys the expanded toolkit for migrating from .NET Framework to .NET 7, detailing new and improved upgrade tools and how they fit together. He explains Upgrade Assistant’s binary analysis and in-place upgrades for libraries and desktop apps, introduces ASP.NET Incremental Migration Tooling for gradually moving ASP.NET apps to ASP.NET Core, and presents System.Web Adapters to interoperate and share code between frameworks. The article also outlines practical... upgrade steps, deployment considerations, and an ecosystem roadmap, urging community feedback to evolve the tooling.See More

In this article, Sam Spencer explains how CoreWCF, an open-source community-driven project, facilitates the modernization of legacy WCF services by porting them to the cross-platform .NET Core framework. He outlines CoreWCF’s architecture, leveraging ASP.NET Core hosting and middleware, and describes how it preserves existing WCF contracts and data contracts while offering partial support for traditional bindings and configurations. Spencer details practical migration ap...proaches, client support, and current limitations, emphasizing that CoreWCF provides a practical and supported pathway for enterprises to modernize WCF-dependent applications without a complete redesign.See More

In this article, Daniel Roth summarizes how .NET 7 advances Blazor into a more productive, interoperable platform for building cross‑platform web and native apps—highlighting new features like Blazor custom elements, improved data‑binding modifiers, navigation locking, dynamic auth requests, a WebAssembly loading UI, empty templates, richer hot‑reload and debugging, expanded crypto, low‑level JS<->.NET interop, and Blazor Hybrid with .NET MAUI—positioning Blazor as a mat...ure, modern choice for UI across browsers, mobile, and desktop.See More