Introducing .NET 8

.NET is a platform developed by Microsoft for building different types of applications, including web, mobile, and desktop applications. The .NET team has been working hard on tightening everything up for us developers for years. They have been making everything simpler, smaller, cross-platform, and open source – not to mention easier to utilize your existing knowledge of .NET development.

.NET Core was a step toward a more unified .NET. It allowed Microsoft to re-envision the whole .NET platform, build it in a completely new way, and make it run on even more platforms.

There were three different types of .NET runtimes:

• .NET Framework (full .NET)
• .NET Core
• Mono/Xamarin

Different runtimes had different capabilities and performances. This also meant that creating a .NET Core app (for example) had different tooling and frameworks that needed to be installed.

.NET 5 was the start of our journey toward one single .NET. With this unified toolchain, the experience of creating, running, and so on, became the same across all the different project types. “Framework” and “Core” were dropped from the name. .NET 5 is still modular in a similar way to what we are used to, so we do not have to worry that merging all the different .NET versions is going to result in a bloated .NET.

Thanks to the .NET platform, you will be able to reach all the platforms we talked about at the beginning of this chapter (web, desktop, mobile, games, the cloud (or server side), AI, and even IoT) using only C# and with the same tooling.

Blazor has been around for a while now. In .NET Core 3, the first version of Blazor Server was released, and at Microsoft Build in 2020, Microsoft released Blazor WebAssembly.

In .NET 5, we got a lot of new components for Blazor – pre-rendering and CSS isolation to name a couple of things. Don’t worry; we will go through all these things throughout the book.

In .NET 6, we got even more functionality, like Hot Reload, co-located JavaScript, new components, and much more, all of which we will explore throughout the book.

In .NET 7, we got even more enhancements for Blazor developers. We got performance improvements and get/set/after modifiers, among other things.

In November 2023, Microsoft released .NET 8, and with that, everything changed. During development, this new way of developing Blazor apps was called “Blazor United,” which is a name they now have updated to simply Blazor. This is the new way of creating Blazor applications and it is an awesome way. But let’s save something for later chapters as well.

.NET 8 brought us performance improvements, native AOT, better source generators, and so much more. It is also an LTS (Long-Term Support) version.

Looking at the enhancements and number of features, I can only conclude that Microsoft believes in Blazor, and so do I.

Now that you know about some of the surrounding technologies, in the next section, it’s time to introduce the main character of this book: Blazor.