Azure Functions 4.0 Preview Out with Support for .NET 6 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Azure Functions 4.0 Preview Out with Support for .NET 6

By David Ramel
10/01/2021

Azure Functions 4.0 is out in a public preview, complete with support for the upcoming .NET 6.

The offering is used for serverless cloud computing, wherein chunks of code -- functions -- respond to events, triggering some type of functionality. It's the Azure equivalent of AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.

After providing support for .NET 5 in March, the dev team gave developers a sneak peek of Azure Functions on .NET 6 in June.

That .NET 5 support, for technical reasons, had to move to an out-of-process model that runs a .NET 5 worker process alongside the runtime. Thus the new public preview comes with two programing models, one in-process (the model in .NET Core 3.1) and one isolated.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Differences with .NET Class Library Functions *(source: Microsoft).*

"With the in-process programming model and Azure Functions 4.0, you can write .NET 6 function apps that take advantage of advanced features such as Durable Functions," Microsoft's Anthony Chu said in a recent blog post. "".NET 6 is also supported in Azure Functions 4.0 using the isolated process programming model. The isolated model gives you full control over the language worker startup configuration and provides useful features like dependency injection and middleware. Currently, you can use the command line to create and deploy your .NET 6 isolated apps. .NET 6 isolated process support is coming soon to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code."

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Future of .NET on Azure Functions *(source: Microsoft).*

Azure Functions 4.0 supports these programming languages and runtimes:

NET 6.0 (in-process and isolated process)
Node.js 14
Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9
Java 8, 11
PowerShell 7.0
Custom Handlers

While the team works to provide a ready-to-go product in time for the general availability release of .NET 6 next month, some breaking changes will be introduced, which can be tracked with the help of a subscription to App Service Announcements.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets devs specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.
SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric in Preview for Faster AI Apps

Microsoft's early embrace of advanced AI in its dev tooling continues apace with the new public preview of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, the company's analytics/data platform.
Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story

The company will infuse multi-agent runtime tech developed in its AutoGen research project into its production-ready Semantic Kernel SDK, both open source.
Uno Platform Unveils 'Hot Design' Tool for Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform provided a new take on visual designers for .NET app development, claiming a breakthrough that changes code at runtime rather than the design stage.
Simple k-NN Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of k-nearest neighbors regression to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, k-NN regression is often slightly less accurate, but is very simple to implement and customize, and the results are highly interpretable.