As .NET Turns 20, Microsoft Says .NET 7 Preview 1 Coming This Week -- Visual Studio Magazine

As .NET Turns 20, Microsoft Says .NET 7 Preview 1 Coming This Week

By David Ramel
02/14/2022

Microsoft, in celebrating the 20th anniversary of .NET, revealed that the first preview of the latest version, .NET 7, will debut this week.

The company today held a special event to mark the 20th anniversary of .NET, which is available for replay.

"With the rise of the internet, the world saw an easier way to share information," said Microsoft marketing director Beth Massi in a Feb. 13 blog post about the anniversary. "Technology shifted towards distributed systems that communicated over the internet. .NET was built for this internet revolution. Multiple languages, one runtime, and a set of libraries and APIs that were all compatible. .NET was at the forefront of Microsoft's transformation to embrace the internet age. We even started tagging '.NET' onto many of our product names back then! Who remembers Windows .NET Enterprise Server? 😊"

**[Click on image for larger view.]** .NET at 20 *(source: Microsoft).*

In explaining what's coming up next for .NET, Massi noted the upcoming release of .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI), an evolution of Xamarin.Forms (adding Windows desktop app support) that slipped the schedule and missed the debut of .NET 6 last November.

She also narrowed down the time-frame for the first preview of .NET 7, which will fully unify the ecosystem like .NET 6 was supposed to do before several significant problems slowed production.

"We just released .NET 6 in November 2021 and are full speed ahead building .NET 7," Massi said. "In fact, .NET 7 Preview 1 will release this week. With .NET 6 you now have a unified set of base libraries and SDK, a simplified development experience with investments in C# 10 and minimal APIs, high productivity with hot reload, and a whole lot more. .NET 6 is the fasted adopted version of .NET yet, and we're seeing very good reception from users. I encourage you to give it a try if you haven't already."

As Visual Studio Magazine recently reported in the article "What's Coming for Blazor Hybrid in .NET 7," Microsoft last month set up GitHub infrastructure for the first three .NET 7 previews, but it only includes placeholder text as of now. "Seeing as how .NET 6 saw seven previews and two release candidates, the first .NET 7 preview should land any day now," said the article. Three days later came Massi's reveal.

Developers can check out the Themes of .NET site for a general, high-level overview of what the dev team is trying to accomplish, along with the ASP.NET Core Roadmap for .NET 7 GitHub issue that shows what's on tap for the web-dev component of .NET 7.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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