Microsoft has announced plans for more packages and plans for .NET 8.0 at the upcoming Build 2023 conference. Although the first four preview versions of .NET 8.0 are currently available, no new version was released as part of the Build 2023 conference. However, Microsoft did make some announcements regarding preview versions that are coming in the next few months leading up to the planned release date of November 2023.
One of the key announcements was the integration of Duende Identity Server into ASP.NET Core by Microsoft. The project templates will be removed, but developers can still add a connection to Identity Server or other OIDC-compatible authentication servers themselves.
Microsoft also revealed that it will simplify the use of its own application-specific authentication tokens without a central OIDC-compatible authentication server in ASP.NET Core 8.0. The next long-term support version will appear with .NET 8.0.
In addition, Microsoft introduced a new package, Microsoft.Extensions.Http.Resilience, which allows developers to call AddStandardResilienceHandler(). The package offers numerous settings for behavior in case of transient errors such as timeout, retry count, rate limiting, and fallback.
Microsoft also presented metrics for the Ahead-of-Time compiler (“Native AOT”), which was introduced in .NET 7.0 and will be extended to web services with gRPC and Minimal WebAPIs in .NET 8.0. The new features make it easier to integrate with monitoring software and application performance monitoring cloud applications, such as Application Insights, AWS Cloud Watch, and Google Cloud Monitoring.
Blazor WebAssembly will now finally have real multithreading, allowing for developer-created threads. Microsoft also wants to improve hot reloading of Blazor applications in .NET 8.0.
Microsoft also presented Blazor United, which was announced in January 2023. It is intended to offer progressive enhancements for a modern web application, but is still only available as a prototype.
Overall, .NET was less represented at this year’s Build conference than in previous years, with just six presentations from the .NET development team. Nevertheless, the upcoming .NET 8.0 release has some exciting features and enhancements to look forward to.
