We will talk about what is .Net, what it does, what is the new version all about, what value it brings to the table, and what it means for enterprise applications. So, without further ado, let’s begin. 

We hear people talking about .Net time and again, chances are some of you may even have used it at some point or continue to use it in your everyday life today. But to level the ground for everybody and bring everyone on the same page, let us take a minute to answer the very simple question – what is .Net? 

According to Microsoft, .Net is a free, cross-platform, open-source developer platform for building many different types of applications. With .Net, one can use multiple language editors & libraries to build for web, mobile, desktop, games, IoT, and a lot more. To put it in a nutshell .Net is an open-source developer platform created by Microsoft for building many different types of applications.  

Over the years, .Net has evolved considerably. The platform has expanded beyond the original .Net Core which has brought to the fore many important changes made to the .Net platform. .Net is now open-source and cross-platform. It is also no longer tied to the Windows’ release cycles. Earlier, there would be many, many years of gap between even consecutive releases for .Net, however, this has improved significantly in recent times. Nowadays, there is a new .Net release every year.  

In line with these developments, the latest version of .Net – the .Net 7 arrived at the end of 2022 and has been gradually making waves among users – both individuals and enterprises. The new version quite expectedly carried a host of new features and brought along some valuable ways to bring the older .Net framework code to the new platform. The .Net 7 has prioritized the improvement of performance. It has also focused on enabling users to go straight from the development tools to the cloud-native containers that can be used in Kubernetes.

Until this version came along, .Net was only able to support Intel and AMD processors. But a whole new generation of ARM processors has been staring right back at us for a while now, so building in support for these processors was becoming critical, which has now been addressed in .Net 7. Power and space budgets are getting tighter.

Additionally, the .Net 7 is built with better code. This is one of the major improvements we are seeing in this new release – a continuous improvement in the base class libraries that are used to build the code. With this, the developers’ skills become significantly transferable – so you can learn .Net once and then use those skills to build everything – from desktop applications to the web, from mobile applications to server code, and everything in between. APIs are available for providing user interfaces web servers distributed applications, etc.  

.Net 7 also keeps up with the latest development in the industry and now offers support for DevOps practices. It offers support for many tools which support the now increasingly popular OpenTelemetry standards.

We can say that .Net 7 is a truly modern release. The new release sheds the baggage of two decades of the legacy framework that .Net has built and instead gives users a whole new platform is an amazing thing here. This is effectively the third release for the new .Net and we see major improvements happening with each version. The new .Net is a new, improved, and effectively future-proof version of the platform packing some very amazing features. 

We come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening to us. The year has just begun, and the appraisal season will be here soon.