Unleashing the Power of .NET 7: What's New and Exciting

Performance Improvements

.NET 7 continues the journey of performance optimization, delivering significant gains across various scenarios. From faster garbage collection to enhanced JIT compilation, developers can expect more responsive and efficient applications.

Key highlights include:

• Reduced allocations in many common operations.
• Vectorization enhancements for SIMD operations.
• Improved startup times for console applications and cloud services.

Minimal APIs: Streamlined Web Development

Minimal APIs, introduced in .NET 6, have been further refined in .NET 7, making it even easier to build lightweight web APIs. This approach allows for a more concise and declarative way to define your endpoints.

Example of a simple Minimal API:

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
var app = builder.Build();

app.MapGet("/", () => "Hello from .NET 7 Minimal API!");

app.Run();
                

C# 11 Features

.NET 7 ships with C# 11, bringing a suite of powerful new language features that boost developer productivity and code readability.

Raw String Literals

Simplify the creation of strings that contain special characters or require multiple lines without the need for excessive escape characters.

string json = """
{
  "name": "Example",
  "version": "1.0"
}
""";
                

Generic Math

Enable writing code that works with any numeric type in a type-safe manner.

public static T Add(T a, T b) where T : INumber
{
    return a + b;
}
                

Auto-default Structs

Structs automatically have their fields initialized to their default values, reducing boilerplate code.

Native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) Compilation

With .NET 7, Native AOT compilation for self-contained applications has matured significantly. This allows you to compile your .NET applications directly to native machine code, resulting in smaller deployment sizes and faster startup times, especially beneficial for serverless and containerized environments.

Container Improvements

.NET 7 offers enhanced support for containerization, including optimizations for smaller base images and improved tooling for building and publishing containers.