The first Release Candidate for .NET has been released. Microsoft says this is the first of two release candidates, which rather seems to miss the point of a release candidate, but never mind. .

.NET was created from a combination of .NET Framework and .NET Core, and this latest release is designed to improve observability, startup times, codegen, and GC regions in addition to native AOT compilation. NET 7 will be a current release and will be supported for 18 months

Among the improvements in .NET 7 is the inclusion of .NET MAUI. Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is designed to make it possible to create a single project that handles multi-targeting across devices and their platforms, specifically Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows APIs from a single API.

Microsoft is also highlighting the ability to build cloud native apps using .NET, with a set of best practices for building your apps for and in the cloud.

In feature terms, the main improvement to the release candidate is the inclusion of Entity Framework Core 7 Release Candidate. EF7 has added "provider-agnostic" support for JSON columns, with an implementation for SQL Server. The support will mean developers can save and query into JSON-based documents stored in relational database columns. While this release candidate supports SQL Server, the plan is that the support will be aligned with existing implementations for Npgsql and Pomelo MySQL, and there will also be support for SQLite.

The other major improvement to EF7 is the ability to carry out bulk updates and deletes. Specifically, to carry out predicate-based updates for many database rows without loading data into memory. The developers say that change tracking followed by SaveChanges is the primary mechanism in EF Core for inserting, updating, and deleting entities, and up till now this has required loading the entities into memory. Bulk or set-based updates can be significantly faster.

.NET 7 Release Candidate is available for download now.

More Information

.NET 7 Release Candidate

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