Preview 3 of .NET 8 has been released with improvements to ASP.NET Core and enhanced support for Blazor.

.NET was created from a combination of .NET Framework and .NET Core. NET 8 is a long-term support (LTS) release and will be supported for three years after initial release.

The most obvious improvement to the new preview is ASP.NET Core support for native AOT, with an initial focus on cloud-native API applications in this preview. You can now publish an ASP.NET Core app with native AOT, producing a self-contained app that's ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to native code. The benefits of native AOT apps are that they're smaller to deploy, quick to start, and use less memory. They can also be run on a machine that doesn't have the .NET runtime installed.

This new release also offers server-side rendering with Blazor. The .NET developers say this is the start of the Blazor unification effort to enable using Blazor components for all your web UI needs, client-side and server-side. The version in the preview is itself an early preview of the functionality, so it's still somewhat limited. ASP.NET Core has existing support for server side rendering with MVC and Razor Pages, but these frameworks lack a component model for building reusable pieces of web UI. Blazor overcomes this limitation, by letting developers build server-rendered UI using Blazor components that can then also be extended to the client.

Other improvements in this release include the ability to render Razor components outside of ASP.NET Core; sections support in Blazor and the ability to monitor Blazor server circuit activity.
Finally, SIMD is now enabled by default for Blazor WebAssembly apps.

.NET 8 Preview 3 is available for download now.

More Information

.NET 8 Preview 3

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