Microsoft announces the general availability of .NET 9 with thousands of improvements

.NET is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework from Microsoft that enables developers to build modern apps and cloud services. Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 9, a major release that includes thousands of performance, security, and functional improvements.

Microsoft promises significant performance improvements with .NET 9, with over 1,000 performance-related changes across the runtime, workloads, and languages. According to the TechEmpower benchmark, .NET 9 can now process 15% more requests compared to .NET 8. You can learn more about .NET 9's performance improvements here. The .NET 9 runtime also includes several performance improvements, including loop optimizations, inlining, and Arm64 vectorization and code generation.

Along with .NET 9, Microsoft also announced the release of .NET Aspire 9 with several new features. Developers can now start and stop resources from the dashboard, keep containers alive between debug sessions, and more. The .NET Aspire 9 release also comes with integrations for OpenAI, Ollama, Milvus, and many more for rapid AI development.

ASP.NET Core in .NET 9 comes with improvements to Blazor, SignalR, minimal APIs, OpenAPI, and authentication and authorization.

Microsoft recently released Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData to offer a unified layer of C# abstractions for interacting with AI services, including language models, embeddings, and more.

Microsoft highlighted that NuGet is the fastest-growing package ecosystem year over year. Microsoft recently introduced a fresh new look for NuGet.org with support for dark mode, partnered with GitHub to add native NuGet support to Dependabot, and more.

Accompanying the .NET 9 release, Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2022 17.12 with significant performance improvements, improved debugging & diagnostics, better integration with .NET Aspire, analyzer support for C# 13, improved Git support, and more.

.NET 9 will be supported by Microsoft for 18 months as a standard-term support (STS) release. Overall, .NET 9 is a significant upgrade for developers, offering enhanced performance, new tools, and improved support.