.NET 5.0 is now generally available

Earlier at Build 2019, Microsoft announced the next major version of their .NET Framework,  .NET 5.0. It is a cross-platform product and will be able to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly, and more.

For Visual Studio users, you need Visual Studio 16.8 or later to use .NET 5.0 on Windows and the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac) on macOS. The C# extension for Visual Studio Code already supports .NET 5.0 and C# 9.

Microsoft announced today that .NET 5.0 is generally available, along with C# 9 and F# 5. The platform upgrade replaces the legacy .NET Core 3 family.

The company notes:

ASP.NET Core, EF Core, C# 9, and F# 5 are also being released today. .NET Conf 2020 — our free and virtual conference — is being held today so you can learn about all of the new releases.

For Visual Studio users, you need Visual Studio 16.8 or later to use .NET 5.0 on Windows and the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac) on macOS. The C# extension for Visual Studio Code already supports .NET 5.0 and C# 9.

The following are the key features of .NET 5.0

• .NET 5.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and Bing.com (version).
• Performance is greatly improved across many components and is described in detail at Performance Improvements in .NET 5.0, Arm64 Performance in .NET 5.0, and gRPC.
• C# 9 and F# 5 offer new language improvements such as top-level programs and records for C# 9, while F# 5 offers interactive programming and a performance boost for functional programming on .NET.
• .NET libraries have enhanced performance for Json serialization, regular expressions, and HTTP (HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2). They are also are now completely annotated for nullability.
• P95 latency has dropped due to refinements in the GC, tiered compilation, and other areas.
• Application deployment options are better, with ClickOnce client app publishing, single-file apps, reduced container image size, and the addition of Server Core container images.
• Platform scope expanded with Windows Arm64 and WebAssembly.

The release is really exciting. Going further, Microsoft is about to release a major new version of .NET every year.