Microsoft releases .NET 5 Preview 1
It won't be until November that we see the general release of .NET 5, but ahead of this Microsoft has released .NET 5 Preview 1 for developers to try out.
With .NET 5, Microsoft is continuing to unify .NET into a single platform; it will include ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, WinForms, WPF, Xamarin and ML.NET. Key changes here are significant improvements to the Regex engine, which Microsoft says brings throughput improvements of between 3x and 6x.
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Announcing the availability of the first preview, Microsoft says: "For the first time, the entire platform will use a unified BCL (Base Class Libraries) for all the app models. Having a version 5 that is higher than both .NET Core and .NET Framework also makes it clear that .NET 5 is the future of .NET, which is a single unified platform for building any type of application".
The company goes on to say:
We have said this many times, but we will reiterate again; .NET Core and then .NET 5 is the .NET you should build all your NEW applications with. .NET Framework will remain supported as long as Windows itself is supported. We will continue to provide security and bug fixes and keep the networking and crypto API's up to date. It will remain safe and supported to keep your older applications on .NET Framework.
Microsoft highlights a number of improvements:
- Regular expression performance improvements
- Code quality improvements in RyuJIT
- Assembly load diagnostics added to event pipe
- Event pipe profiler APIs
- GitHub repo consolidation
Here are the download links you need: .NET 5.0 Preview 1 SDK and .NET 5.0 Preview 1 Runtime
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