Microsoft today announced the first preview release of .NET 7, along with previews of ASP.NET Core 7 and Entity Framework 7.

“Today, we are excited to announce the next milestone in the history of .NET,” Microsoft senior program manager Jeremy Likness writes. “.NET 7 Preview 1 marks the first step forward towards the next 20 years of .NET.”

According to Microsoft, .NET 7 builds on the foundation established by .NET 6. It will include improved support for cloud-native scenarios, tools to make it easier to upgrade legacy projects, and will simplify the developer experience by making it easier to work with containers. In Preview 1, Microsoft is introducing annotations to APIs to support nullability, ongoing JIT compiler optimizations, new APIs, and support for more hot reload scenarios.

Going forward, Microsoft will make bigger investments in ASP.NET Core, Blazor, EF Core, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and more.

You can download .NET 7 Preview 1 for Windows, macOS, and Linux, but Microsoft recommends that developers interested in targeting this version use a preview channel version of Visual Studio for Windows and not the recently released Visual Studio 2022 version 17.1. Visual Studio for Mac does not yet support the .NET 7 preview.

Unlike .NET 6, which was a Long Term Support (LTS) version with 3 years of support, .NET 7 will be a Current release, so it will receive 18 months of support from its release date.

Tagged with .NET, .NET 7