.NET 9 released

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of.NET 9, the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant release of.NET yet. It’s the result of another year of effort on the part of thousands of developers from around the world. This new release includes thousands of performance, security, and functional improvements. You will find sweeping enhancements across the entire.NET stack from the programming languages, developer tools, and workloads enabling you to build with a unified platform and easily infuse your apps with AI.
↫.NET Team at the.Net Blog

All I know is that these are very important words, and a very important release, for thousands and thousands of unknown developers slaving away in obscurity, creating, maintaining, and fixing endless amounts of corporate software very few of us ever actually get to see very often. They toil away for meager pay in the 21st century version of the coal mines of the 19th century, without any recognition, appreciation, or applause. They work long hours, make their way through the urban planning hell that is modern America, and come home to make some gruel and drink water from lead pipes, waiting for the sweet relief of what little sleep they manage to get, only to do it all over again the next day.

…I may have a bit of a skewed perception of reality for most IT people.

In all seriousness,.NET is a hugely popular set of tools and frameworks, and while it’s probably not the most sexy topic in the tech world, any new release matters to a ton of people..NET 9.0. This new version’s main focus seems to be performance, with over 1000 performance-related changes tot he various components that make up.NET. In a blog post about these performance improvements, Stephen Toub explains in great detail what some of the improvements are, and where the benefits lie.

Of course, there’s an insane amount of talk about “AI” features in.NET 9, and apparently.NET MAUI is seeing a surge in popularity on Android, if you believe Microsoft (“30$” increase in “developer usage” means little when you don’t provide a baseline)..NET MAUI is Microsoft’s cross-platform framework for building applications for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Among other things,.NET MAUI 9 provides more access to platform-native features, as well as benefiting from some of the performance improvements.

There’s also a paragraph about.NET 9 development on Windows, just in case you thought the.NET team forgot Windows existed.

With.NET 9, your Windows apps will have access to the latest OS features and capabilities while ensuring they are more performant and accessible than ever before. Whether you are starting a new modern app with WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK or modernizing your existing WPF and WinForms applications, your Windows apps run best on.NET 9. We have been collaborating closely with the Windows developer community to bring features that you have been requesting. This includes Native AOT support for WinUI 3 for smaller and more performant apps, modern theming enhancements with Fluent UI for WPF, and WinForms gets a boost with a new Dark Mode, modern icon APIs, and improved asynchronous API access with Control.InvokeAsync.
↫.NET Team at the.Net Blog

There’s way more on top of all of this, from changes to the languages.NET uses to new releases of the various developer tools, like Visual Studio.