.NET 9 is now generally available and the framework focuses heavier on AI now

After teasing it earlier this year, Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 9, the latest version of the company’s cross-platform framework for building modern applications and cloud services.

The company said the .NET 9 release is the result of over a year of work from thousands of community members and Microsoft engineers. The release includes thousands of performance, security, and functional improvements.

The new release is available now as a part of Visual Studio 2022 v17.12, which also brings several improvements to the .NET developer experience in the Visual Studio IDE, the company said. For example, .NET 9 can write Azure Functions, Microsoft’s serverless computing platform.

To celebrate the launch of .NET 9 and learn more about what’s new, tune in to .NET Conf 2024, a free, three-day virtual developer event on November 12-14.

Here’s the lowdown on the most significant new features and updates in .NET 9:

.NET 9

The .NET team focuses on Performance, AI, .NET Aspire, and developer productivity.

.NET 9 has improved performance by optimizing the .NET runtime, the C# and F# languages, and the .NET libraries. In .NET 9, .NET workloads like ASP.NET Core and EntityFramework Core start up faster, use less memory, and deliver more throughput. Additionally, the release introduces a new adaptive server garbage collector (GC) for cloud scenarios. Microsoft says the GC will help developers better control memory use in cloud environments.

Microsoft says the platform brings new capabilities for developers building AI-powered apps. For example, the release adds support for new AI services from OpenAI, Semantic Kernel, Milvus, and others, introduces a new AI middleware layer, and updates the .NET ecosystem to enable more efficient AI development.

.NET Aspire, Microsoft’s set of tools, templates, and packages for developing observability dashboards, health checks, and other features, gets an update in .NET 9. The release adds new features to the .NET Aspire telemetry and metrics dashboard, improves observability for Microsoft Azure apps, and enables ASP.NET Core apps to be deployed to Windows virtual machines and AKS with less manual configuration.

Finally, Microsoft says .NET 9 includes new productivity-boosting features in Visual Studio 2022. For example, developers can now use AI-powered Git experiences in Visual Studio, create and manage observability dashboards and health checks in the server explorer tool window, and see detailed telemetry for . NET-based apps are directly available in Visual Studio and Azure Monitor.

In addition to these main features, the platform introduces a new way for developers to create and work with “source generators”—code that writes code—in the .NET ecosystem. Microsoft has also added new capabilities to the .NET CLI, the command-line interface for .NET, to help developers find and fix issues with their code.

For developers working with data in .NET applications, .NET 9 includes a new set of libraries for working with structured data like vectors and tensors. The release also adds a range of new libraries and abstractions to the .NET ecosystem, making it easier to work with data science-focused AI services.

For more information on what’s new in .NET 9, check out the release notes and the high-level post on the official blog.

Microsoft says .NET 9 will be supported for 18 months as a standard-term support (STS) release.