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Visual Studio Live! Flashback: Microsoft's Top 3 Goals for .NET (and .NET 7)
To hear Microsoft say it, the developer ecosystem around .NET is more vibrant than ever, especially since the launch of .NET 7 in November.
James Montemagno, principal lead program manager for .NET Community at Microsoft, said at last fall's Visual Studio Live! conference that .NET 6, released in 2021, was adopted at twice the rate of its predecessor. Meanwhile, the more recent .NET 7 has seen "nearly 30,000 contributions from nearly 10,000 contributors around the globe," more than any other version of .NET.
.NET 7 was a milestone release, and Montemagno's keynote painted a compelling picture of where this version of .NET falls in Microsoft's overall vision for the platform. With the next Visual Studio Live! conference happening just around the corner -- March 19-24 in Las Vegas, Nev. -- it's a good time for Microsoft-focused developers to freshen up their .NET skills, as well as prepare for new features that are coming down the pipeline.
Here were the key quotes and moments from Montemagno's presentation (the Visual Studio Live! event this March promises to build on these ideas even more in the .NET track):
Microsoft's Top 3 .NET Goals
Our goals with .NET are simple. We want to keep it simple, we want to help you build modern applications [and we want to help you] target the cloud if you need to.
.NET Gets 'More Performant' with Every Release
With .NET 7, there was over 1,000 performance improvements going into GitHub. In fact, there's so many improvements that Stephen Toub, [.NET partner software engineer] who writes amazing .NET blog posts, if you were to print these to PDF, it'd be 250 pages. Don't do that. Don't waste trees. … But it's amazing to see the growth and the investment here.
'Minimal' APIs
In .NET 7, we've added new grouping functionality to these new minimal API's to enable you to add powerful features with just a few lines of code like OpenAPI. And we've minimized authentication and authorization, no matter what type of API framework you're using with .NET. We've made it just a few lines of code to add in authentication and minimize it, and we'll continue to do so to make sure that these complex problems are simple, but meet your needs.
Faster Throughput for Entity Framework
In .NET 7, the team invested deeply in ensuring that multiple insertions and updates continuously are improved so you can read and write faster than ever into your database. [For example,] a SaveChange for four rows is now four times faster. Imagine that every single call to your API is four times faster -- the amount of time and energy that is saved, and the resources that you save, as well.
Cloud Native Is King
Demand for cloud-native developers has grown and organizations themselves continue to invest in cloud-native technology. In fact, by 2024, just literally a year away, nearly 50 percent of organizations will be using cloud-native technologies because they know that they need to scale to meet their users' demand as their businesses grow.
Montemagno will be back at Visual Studio Live! this March with more in-depth .NET sessions, including ".NET MAUI: Next Generation Multi-platform App Development" and "Building Teams Apps & Bots with .NET & Blazor." The full conference agenda, registration and pricing information is available here.