Microsoft today released the first preview for .NET 6 which unites and combines .NET 5, the classic .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono/Xamarin into one package. It is expected to bring tons of improvements for cloud, desktop, and mobile apps.
You can download .NET 6 Preview 1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Installers and binaries
- Container images
- Linux packages
- Release notes
- Known issues
- GitHub issue tracker
The final release is expected in November 2021.
The key changes in .NET 6
- The ability to use .NET SDK for making Android and iOS apps will remain available, but mobile workloads will be an optional component of SDK, to it will be smaller in size. This is an upcoming feature.
- Microsoft has launched a special Blazer-based app so everyone interested in .NET can see the feature planning process at a glance. It also supports filters.
- There is a modern UI toolkit, .NET Multi-platform App UI that is built on top of Xamarin, and allows creating apps that look consistent on each supported platform. However, in this Preview 1, it only supports Android and iOS, with the Windows and macOS support coming in the near future.
- .NET 6 will allow building Blazor based desktop apps.
- Faster app building by partial changed code rebuilding on the fly.
- Performance improvements on ARM64.
- Initial support for Apple Silicon M1 chips.
- Container improvements, including performance, reduced image size. Containers in .NET 6 will be based on Alpine 3.13, Debian 11, and Ubuntu 20.04.
- The .NET command-line interface improvements. Response files to specify arguments for console tools, support for Windows ACLs, directive suggestions, New math APIs.
You can learn more about the above changes in the detailed announcement here.
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