.NET 9 is Now Available Microsoft Announces

Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 9 at the .NET Conf 2024 event. The new version of the development platform brings thousands of improvements in the areas of performance, security and functionality.

Performance boost for developers

The second release candidate for the open source development framework was only published at the beginning of October, and the final version is now following. The free, open-source and cross-platform framework brings numerous improvements that are intended to make developers’ work easier.

Microsoft writes about over 1,000 performance-related changes in the Announcement in the blog. The improvements, which span the entire runtime environment, various workloads and programming languages, are available immediately.

Faster, better, more efficient

According to the TechEmpower benchmark, .NET 9 now processes 15 percent more requests compared to .NET 8. The runtime benefits from optimizations in loops, improved inlining and advanced Arm64 vectorization and code generation. These improvements promise noticeably increased efficiency in the development and operation of applications.

Like Microsoft (via Neowin), the update also contains significant innovations for ASP.NET Core. This includes improvements for Blazor, SignalR, OpenAPI, and authentication and authorization. Developers get a comprehensive toolset for modern web applications with numerous improvements.

AI integration made easy

With Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData, .NET 9 introduces a unified abstraction layer in C# that enables interaction with AI services. This includes language models, embeddings and other AI functions, thus simplifying the integration of artificial intelligence into .NET applications. At the same time as .NET 9, .NET Aspire 9 was also released.

This extension allows developers to manage resources directly from a dashboard and keep containers active across debug sessions. In addition, .NET Aspire 9 offers integrations for popular AI services such as OpenAI and OLLama, which supports the rapid development of AI applications.

Long-term support and ecosystem

.NET 9 is supported by Microsoft as a so-called Standard Term Support (STS) release for 18 months with monthly security updates. Developers who need longer-term support can still rely on .NET 8, which was also released last year as a Long-Term Support (LTS) version with three years of support.

Microsoft also announced improvements to the NuGet ecosystem at the .NET Conf 2024 event, which the company says is the fastest-growing package ecosystem. NuGet.org received a fresh design with support for dark mode. Additionally, a partnership with GitHub brought native NuGet support for Dependabot.

.NET 9 downloads and updates for Visual Studio 2022 will be released soon, according to Microsoft.