Talk about moving fast! Microsoft has been hard at work bringing their unified development promise to reality. This upcoming version of .NET, now in preview, will delivery on that promise. Let’s dive into some of the new features below.
Cross-platform experience
Xamarin and specifically Xamarin.forms provide a great platform for building apps targeting Android and iOS. Not only can you easily deliver a consistent experience, but the UI and logic portions of your application are shared. That means you write code once and target both platforms. With .NET 6 the reach is being extended to Windows and macOS. There are also improvements to performance and a more robust set of controls to ensure it truly becomes a one stop shop for building next gen cross platform applications with .NET. For more information this check out out MAUI.
Blazor everywhere
In just a few short years Blazor has gone from an experimental platform for building server side web applications to a fully capable technology capable of pretty much any experience, specially after Blazor in the browser became available through Web Assembly.
Now this goodness is breaking out of the browser and into your desktops and the name of the game is re-usability. Soon you will be able to leverage components built for your web application in your native desktop applications, for example within your existing Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) applications.
ARM64 and Apple Silicon
In this release Arm64 is finally getting some love with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) picking up support. Support for Apple Silicon is also in the mix, but not quite natively supported yet. The official release of this version of .NET is still months away so we can expect improvements by the time it comes out of preview.
Much more
There are many other improvements in tow. This release is a huge step forward in terms of unification of technologies under .NET for targeting pretty much any platform under the sun, mobile, desktop and the web regardless of the operating system. It is really an amazing feat and a great follow up to an already extraordinary .NET 5 release.
For all the details please head over to the official blog post for .NET 6 Preview from Richard Lander, Program Manager at Microsoft.
