Microsoft launched .NET 8 a few months in the past, and though .NET 9 isn’t anticipated to be obtainable till the top of this 12 months, the corporate is sharing some perception into what it has deliberate for this upcoming launch. Along with releasing the roadmap, the corporate additionally introduced that the first preview of .NET 9 and third preview of .NET Aspire are actually obtainable. 

In line with Microsoft, the principle focus areas for enhancements will probably be cloud-native and AI app improvement. 

“We’ve spent the final a number of years constructing out robust cloud native fundamentals, like runtime efficiency and software monitoring. We’ll proceed that effort. We’re additionally turning our focus to delivering paved paths to common manufacturing infrastructure and companies, for instance operating in Kubernetes and utilizing managed database and caching companies like Redis,” the .NET group at Microsoft wrote in a weblog publish. 

For improved cloud-native efficiency, the corporate has been engaged on Native AOT, that are apps which have been compiled to native code ahead-of-time (AOT), leading to sooner startup occasions and smaller reminiscence footprints.

Regardless of its advantages, Native AOT requires the usage of many instruments that builders wouldn’t usually be working with, which makes it inaccessible. An enormous a part of .NET 9 will probably be updating Visible Studio assist to make it extra accessible to builders. 

Visible Studio and Visible Studio Code can even embrace new improvement experiences for .NET Aspire, a improvement stack for constructing cloud-native functions. New enhancements will probably be associated to configuring elements, debugging and sizzling reload for the AppHost and baby processes, and integration with the developer dashboard. 

It’s also working with its Azure Container Apps companions to make sure that .NET 9 apps will be simply scaled inside their Kubernetes environments. 

.NET 9 can even embrace options that allow builders to include AI into their functions. Microsoft will proceed bettering the libraries and documentation for OpenAI and OSS fashions. It’s going to additionally proceed bettering the method for working with Semantic Kernel, OpenAI, and Azure SDK.

The corporate plans to replace its ChatGPT + Enterprise Knowledge with Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Search .NET pattern as nicely. 

“OpenAI has sparked pleasure amongst builders by providing the chance to rework their functions with AI. Over the previous 12 months, Azure Open AI and .NET have been leveraged to create AI options, with Microsoft Copilot being the most well-liked. We’ll proceed to work with prospects on the lookout for methods to make use of their C# abilities to construct this new class of apps, and to quickly put money into our AI platform,” the group wrote. 

Different deliberate options can be found within the .NET 9 Challenge Backlog, which is publicly obtainable.