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In .NET 9 Debut, Microsoft Focuses on .NET Aspire, AI
Microsoft shipped .NET 9 today with the dev team highlighting .NET Aspire and AI in a keynote and follow-on sessions of the livestreamed launch event.
[Click on image for larger view.] .NET 9 Highlights (source: .NET Conf screenshot).
We noted earlier that the company is making a big push for .NET Aspire, and it led off the .NET Conf livestream, even though presenters later on joked about how hard it was to come up with a pithy description of the fairly new initiative.
Before that, here is how Microsoft's Damian Edwards wordily described .NET Aspire early in the livestream:
".NET Aspire is a collection of flexible tools, opinionated templates and curated packages for .NET developers. Aspire simplifies managing projects, resources, containers, microservices and more at development time while you write code, plus Aspire gives you real time insights into your app while you're actively developing it, no more pushing to staging environments or production to see how your changes play with the rest of your stack."
Unsurprisingly, .NET Aspire was also front-and-center in the company's official .NET 9 announcement, being the first component discussed.
".NET Aspire is a set of powerful tools, templates, and packages for seamless development of observable, production-ready apps," said the team. "It's been just six months since the first release of .NET Aspire, and we've already made improvements to all parts of the stack, from new features in the telemetry and metrics dashboard to more streamlined deployment of cloud apps. It's been great to see the adoption of .NET Aspire across applications of all types and watch the community embrace the Integrations and tooling for their scenarios. Plus, we've seen great adoption here at Microsoft -- both the Xbox and Copilot teams have integrated .NET Aspire into their existing services, tightening their inner development loop with easily accessible insights and various compatible Azure Integrations."
[Click on image for larger view.] .NET Aspire (source: Microsoft).
As far as what's new for .NET Aspire 9.0, the team said it introduced top-requested features to streamline app development. Users can now start and stop resources from the dashboard, maintain container persistence between debug sessions, and utilize new APIs, including WaitFor, for improved resource management. New integrations with OpenAI, Ollama, Milvus, and more enhance flexibility. The acquisition process has been simplified for easier adoption, deployment scenarios with Azure Container Apps have been optimized, and there is now preview support for Azure Functions.
Also new is the .NET Aspire Community Toolkit, an open-source a collection of integrations and extensions for developing with .NET Aspire.
AI in .NET 9
Following the .NET Aspire discussion, the team moved on to AI in .NET 9 in both the livestream and announcement post.
"This year, we have seen teams across the industry leverage .NET to build amazing AI solutions," said Microsoft's Maria Naggaga. "From consumer apps with Microsoft Copilot to developer apps with GitHub Copilot, .NET is at the core of these top-tier AI experiences."
Here's a bullet-point summary of what's new for AI in .NET 9:
-
Expanded AI Ecosystem:
- New learning materials and samples
- Simplified integrations into the .NET ecosystem
- Collaborations with partners to build a vibrant AI community
- Improved deployment of AI solutions to the cloud
- AI Building Blocks for .NET: Microsoft introduced new abstractions to streamline AI including:
[Click on image for larger view.] AI Extensions (source: Microsoft).
- Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData: These provide a unified layer of C# abstractions for interacting with AI services, including:
- Small and large language models (SLMs and LLMs)
- Embeddings
- Vector stores
- Middleware
-
Improved tokenizer support in Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers:
- Enhanced tokenization for popular model families (GPT, Llama, Phi, Bert)
- New support for tokenization algorithms (Byte-Level BPE, SentencePiece, WordPiece)
-
Tensor<T> enhancements:
- New type to represent multidimensional data
- Simplifies interoperability between libraries
- Improves applying operations
-
AI Integration Partnerships: .NET 9 includes collaborations with various AI partners to deliver robust offerings to developers, including:
- Azure
- OpenAI
- LlamaIndex
- Qdrant
- Pinecone
- Milvus
- AutoGen
- OllamaSharp
- ONNX Runtime
- Smart Components Ecosystem: Microsoft said it worked with the community and control vendor partners to build out a smart components ecosystem, making it easier to integrate AI-infused controls into .NET apps
-
GitHub Copilot Enhancements: While not strictly part of .NET 9, the announcement highlights improved GitHub Copilot integration for .NET developers, including:
- AI smart variable inspection for debugging
- AI-powered IEnumerable visualizer
- Improved code fixing capabilities
- Enhanced AI completions for C#
- Assistance with debugging failed tests
And More
No one announcement or even multi-day conference can cover everything new in the sprawling .NET 9 framework, but the post goes on to discuss what's new in Blazor, .NET MAUI and other properties, with links to deeper dives into what's new for
and more, with plenty more blog posts and guidance coming up.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.