.NET 6 delivers the final parts of the .NET unification plan that started with .NET 5. .NET 6 unifies the SDK, base libraries, and runtime across mobile, desktop, IoT, and cloud apps. In addition to this unification, the .NET 6 ecosystem offers:
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Simplified development: Getting started is easy. New language features in C# 10 reduce the amount of code you need to write. And investments in the web stack and minimal APIs make it easy to quickly write smaller, faster microservices.
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Better performance: .NET 6 is the fastest full stack web framework, which lowers compute costs if you're running in the cloud.
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Ultimate productivity: .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022 provide hot reload, new git tooling, intelligent code editing, robust diagnostics and testing tools, and better team collaboration.
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Hot Reload: Hot reload is a feature that lets you modify your app's source code and instantly apply those changes to your running app. The feature's purpose is to increase your productivity by avoiding app restarts between edits. Hot reload is available in Visual Studio 2022 and the dotnet watch command-line tool. Hot reload works with most types of .NET apps, and for C#, Visual Basic, and C++ source code. For more information, see the Hot reload blog post.
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.Net MAUI: .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is still in preview, with a release candidate coming in the first quarter of 2022 and general availability (GA) in the second quarter of 2022. .NET MAUI makes it possible to build native client apps for desktop and mobile operating systems with a single codebase. For more information, see the Update on .NET Multi-platform App UI blog post.
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HTTP/3
.NET 6 includes preview support for HTTP/3, a new version of HTTP. HTTP/3 solves some existing functional and performance challenges by using a new underlying connection protocol called QUIC. QUIC establishes connections more quickly, and connections are independent of the IP address, allowing mobile clients to roam between Wi-fi and cellular networks. For more information, see Use HTTP/3 with HttpClient.
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ASP.NET Core
ASP.NET Core includes improvements in minimal APIs, ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for Blazor WebAssembly apps, and single-page apps. In addition, Blazor components can now be rendered from JavaScript and integrated with existing JavaScript based apps. For more information, see What's new in ASP.NET Core 6.
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Security
.NET 6 adds preview support for two key security mitigations: Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and "write exclusive execute" (W^X).
CET is an Intel technology available in some newer Intel and AMD processors. It adds capabilities to the hardware that protect against some control-flow hijacking attacks. .NET 6 provides support for CET for Windows x64 apps, and you must explicitly enable it. For more information, see .NET 6 compatibility with Intel CET shadow stacks.
W^X is available all operating systems with .NET 6 but only enabled by default on Apple Silicon. W^X blocks the simplest attack path by disallowing memory pages to be writeable and executable at the same time.
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IL trimming
Trimming of self-contained deployments is improved. In .NET 5, only unused assemblies were trimmed. .NET 6 adds trimming of unused types and members too. In addition, trim warnings, which alert you to places where trimming may remove code that's used at run time, are now enabled by default. For more information, see Trim self-contained deployments and executables.
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Code analysis
The .NET 6 SDK includes a handful of new code analyzers that concern API compatibility, platform compatibility, trimming safety, use of span in string concatenation and splitting, faster string APIs, and faster collection APIs. For a full list of new (and removed) analyzers, see Analyzer releases - .NET 6.
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NuGet package validation
If you're a NuGet library developer, new package-validation tooling enables you to validate that your packages are consistent and well-formed. You can determine if:
- There are any breaking changes across package versions.
- The package has the same set of public APIs for all runtime-specific implementations.
- There are any gaps for target-framework or runtime applicability.
For more information, see the Package Validation blog post.
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Reflection APIs
.NET 6 introduces the following new APIs that inspect code and provide nullability information:
These APIs are useful for reflection-based tools and serializers.
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