Microsoft has made .NET 7 available. The new version of the developer platform is Microsoft’s latest effort to make .NET more universal with a single SDk and runtime.
Microsoft has the software made publicly available after it first existed as beta. The new version of .NET is 7.0 and has both better performance and new features. Microsoft writes in a blog post that those new features include support for C# 11 and F# 7. Microsoft has also included .NET MAUI in the software, and most of the existing frameworks such as Blazor and Forms have been updated. It is also possible to run .NET 7 projects in containers and to implement workflows in GitHub actions. .NET 7 also has native support for Arm64 and enhanced support for Linux systems.
The new version of the software marks the third time Microsoft has attempted to make .NET ‘unified’. The company already tried that with .NET 5. Microsoft has been working since 2014 on the possibility to make the old framework, which until then only worked on Windows, open source and make it compatible with other systems. With .NET 5, Microsoft was already trying to create a single .NET runtime and framework from a single codebase. Later, Microsoft said that wouldn’t happen until .NET 6. Due to the pandemic and the associated logistical challenges, Microsoft decided not to include certain components such as the Multi-platform App UI in .NET. This is happening for the first time in version 7.0. This makes it look like all of the .NET code that was previously in Core, Framework, Xamarin, and Mono has finally been ported over to the single .NET 7.0 codebase.
.NET 7 is a standard term support release. That means the software will receive 18 months of support, until May 2024. That is less than predecessor .NET 6, which will be supported as a long-term support release until November 2024.