They have only passed three months since Microsoft released .NET 8, the latest version of its open source development platform. Today, the company decided to waste no time in not only announcing its successor, .NET 9, but also in release the first preview version.
In a blog post, Microsoft also outlined its development goals and ultimate vision for .NET 9, which aims offer new tools for cloud development along with new AI features.
Microsoft said it will continue its efforts to develop its cloud-based platform features for developers. A firm commitment from the Redmond giant to new technologies.
“We are also focusing our focus on delivering paved roads to popular production infrastructure and services, for example, running on Kubernetes and using managed cache and database services like Redis.”
Focus on infrastructure and popular production services
Microsoft will work with partners to make their Azure Container Apps can scale in your environment based on Kubernetes with support for multiple instances. In terms of cloud-based development tools, Microsoft stated that .NET 9 will include new features for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code users through .NET Aspire.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Microsoft-led project without some type of AI integration. The blog post mentioned that members of the .NET 9 team will work to add even more AI features to the platform. That means developers can expect to access OpenAI and OSS models with lots of documentation and libraries.
Developers can go ahead and download the first preview version of .NET 9 from GitHub. The site also has the .NET 9 Project Backlog to see what new features and improvements they plan to put in the final version. Future preview versions of .NET 9 will also be available on GitHub, and you can check the platform release notes each time a new version is released to see what new features, additions, and bug fixes are added.