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Production-Ready .NET Core 3.0 Transitions from New Features to Polish
.NET Core 3.0 is nearing the finish line, with the dev team transitioning from creating new features to just polishing the release while announcing a new production-ready Preview 7.
In fact, Microsoft's own .NET site for the free, cross-platform, open source developer platform has been using Preview 7 for a couple of weeks.
In order for others to use it, though, they have to wait for Visual Studio 2019 16.3 Preview 1, coming later this week.
"NET Core 3.0 Preview 7 is supported by Microsoft and can be used in production," the company said in a blog post today (July 23). "We intend to make very few changes after Preview 7 for most APIs. Notable exceptions are: WPF, Windows Forms, Blazor and Entity Framework. Any breaking changes after Preview 7 will be documented."
Preview 7 does sport a smaller SDK due to a new way of creating purpose-built "packs" of reference assemblies, frameworks, templates and so on instead of building with NuGet packages that included extra artifacts. That resulted in 68 percent to 76 percent shrinkage across Windows, Linux and macOS platforms.
Other than that, it's basically on to general availability.
"The .NET Core 3.0 release is coming close to completion, and the team is solely focused on stability and reliability now that we're no longer building new features," said Richard Lander, program manager on the .NET team. "Please tell us about any issues you find, ideally as quickly as possible. We want to get as many fixes in as possible before we ship the final 3.0 release."
The roadmap says that's set for September.
All changes in Preview 7 can be seen here.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.