.NET 7 Features | .NET 7 is Available Now | What 's new in .NET 7?

In this article, we will discuss .NET 7 features.

So recently Microsoft release .NET 7 which contains a performance improvement and new features in the below application.

With .NET 7, now we can containerize our .NET 7 application and set up CI/CD workflows in GitHub.

We can Download .NET 7 from here.

C# 11 Updates

NET 7 is released with the new feature of C# 11. if you want to see the full list of changes then see the list of new features in C# 11.

Generic Math Support

Generic math support is unlocked by the other new feature of C# 11, static abstract and virtual members, which might otherwise seem like a pretty obscure object-oriented programming (OOP) change.

File-Scoped Types

You can use the file access modifier to create a type whose visibility is scoped to just the source file in which it is declared. This can help you avoid naming collisions.

Auto-Default Structs

All fields and auto-properties of a struct type are now automatically initialized to their default value if they are not set by the constructor.

UTF-8 String Literals

By default, C# strings are hardcoded to UTF-16, whereas the prevailing string encoding on the internet is UTF-8. To minimize the hassle and performance overhead of converting, you can now simply append a u8 suffix to your string literals to get them in UTF-8 right away:

You can specify the u8 suffix on a string literal to specify UTF-8 character encoding.

byte[] u8Span = "ABC"u8;
u8Span.ToArray().Should().BeEquivalentTo(new[] { 65, 66, 67 });

var u8 = "This is a UTF-8 string!"u8;

Required Members

The required modifier indicates that a field or property must be initialized either by the constructor method or by an object initializer statement used when calling the constructor.

public class Person
{
    public required string FirstName { get; init; }
    public string? MiddleName { get; init; }
    public required string LastName { get; init; }
}
It is now an error to create a Person without initializing both the required properties:
var person = new Person { FirstName = "Ada" }; // Error: no LastName!

Raw String Literals

Raw string literals are a new format for string literals that can contain arbitrary text, including whitespace, new lines, embedded quotes, and other special characters without requiring escape sequences.

A raw string literal starts with three or more double quotes and ends with a matching number of double quotes. This can be great for JSON-formatted string data, as in the following example

A raw string literal is delimited by at least three double quotes:

var raw1 = """This\is\all "content"!""";
Console.WriteLine(raw1);

This prints:

This\is\all "content"!

Generic Attributes

You can now create a generic class that inherits from System. Attribute. This feature provides a more convenient syntax for attributes that require a Type parameter.

// Before C# 11:
public class TypeAttribute : Attribute
{
   public TypeAttribute(Type t) => ParamType = t;
   public Type ParamType { get; }
}

[TypeAttribute(typeof(string))]
public string Method() => default;
Using this new feature, you can create a generic attribute instead:


// C# 11 feature:
public class GenericAttribute<T> : Attribute { }
Then, specify the type parameter to use the attribute:

[GenericAttribute<string>()]
public string Method() => default;

Newlines in String Interpolation Expressions

The text inside the { and } characters for an interpolated string can now include new-line characters, allowing you to write more complex, multi-line C# expressions in your interpolated strings.

List Patterns

The very powerful pattern-matching feature in C# now includes array/list patterns.

C# 11 adds list patterns to the story. With list patterns, you can apply patterns recursively to the individual elements of list-like input – or to a range of them. Let’s jump right in with the generic algorithm from above, rewritten as a recursive method using list patterns:

T AddAll<T>(params T[] elements) where T : IMonoid<T> => 
    elements switch
{
    [] => T.Zero,
    [var first, ..var rest] => first + AddAll<T>(rest),
};

public static int CheckSwitch(int[] values)
    => values switch
    {
        [1, 2, .., 10] => 1,
        [1, 2] => 2,
        [1, _] => 3,
        [1, ..] => 4,
        [..] => 50
    };

WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 1, 2, 10 }));          // prints 1
WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 1, 2, 7, 3, 3, 10 })); // prints 1
WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 1, 2 }));              // prints 2
WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 1, 3 }));              // prints 3
WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 1, 3, 5 }));           // prints 4
WriteLine(CheckSwitch(new[] { 2, 5, 6, 7 }));        // prints 50

.NET MAUI Updates

In .NET 7, MAUI now has several new features, including a new Map control, better support for dual-screen devices, improvements to the UI responsiveness, faster startup, and better overall app size. Microsoft has also released a migration assistant for upgrading your Xamarin projects to .NET MAUI.

ASP.NET 7 Updates

With the web and web APIs still being at the center of so many modern applications, server-side ASP.NET is as important as ever. The ASP.NET team continues to make major investments into ASP.NET Core in .NET 7, including the handful of our favorite new features below:

Rate-Limiting Middleware

If you want to limit the traffic you get to a web application or API, you have a new option with rate-limiting middleware that controls the load on your application by queueing up traffic when it exceeds certain limits. This prevents other parts of your application from becoming a bottleneck.

MVC and Razor Pages

Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about server-side web applications, either. MVC and Razor pages got some improvements, like nullable models and a customized cookie consent value. You can read more about these changes on the Microsoft Learn site.

API Controllers

API controllers can now use the new decompression middleware to allow them to handle requests with compressed content. Controller classes also get better dependency injection support without the need to use the [FromServices] attribute.

Minimal APIs

We’re excited about Minimal APIs here at Trailhead. They are the new, low-code way to define web API endpoints in ASP.NET.
Minimal APIs get some big improvements in .NET 7, including the addition of filters. This allows you to run code before or after your route handlers, or to inspect and modify your requests or responses. Other changes make unit tests easier to write for minimal APIs, add better support for the OpenAPI standard (formerly known as Swagger), and make streaming and file uploads easier.
Finally, minimal APIs built in .NET 7 will have new ways of defining routes in groups that share the same base path or other common configuration settings.

gRPC

A new transcoder middleware allows you to write gRPC services that also operate as RESTful JSON APIs. This allows you to use the latest and greatest web service technologies while still providing backward compatibility for clients who haven’t been upgraded to use gRPC.

Performance

Output caching is a new middleware in .NET 7 which stores responses from a web app and serves them from a cache.
HTTP/3 is also now fully supported, and Kestrel can handle HTTP/2 traffic much faster than it used to in .NET 6. There is even new support for running SignalR WebSockets over HTTP/2, something that we’ve sorely missed in previous versions.
You can read more about the many great performance improvements for ASP.NET Core in .NET 7 here.

Other

There is new and improved console output for the Dotnet watch now. The developer exception page in ASP.NET has a dark mode in .NET 7. If you prefer to use Program.Main instead of top-level statements, there’s a Dotnet new command-line switch for that. Also, Dotnet new includes new React and Angular starter templates, and the Dotnet command-line interface includes new tooling for JWTs.

Cloud Native and Containers

Our .NET applications have been able to run in containers for a long time now, but with .NET 7, Microsoft has added support for creating containerized applications as part of a build-publish process, with no need for an explicit Docker build phase.
With so many cool new features, we suspect many of you will be as eager as we are to incorporate .NET 7 into your projects.

ARM64 Support

These days ARM processors are getting more and more common because of their high performance and low power consumption. With this release, .NET now fully supports targeting the ARM architecture.

Conclusion

If you are planning to work with .NET 7, then we would like to tell Microsoft follows the tick-tock pattern with all .NET versions.
All even-numbered versions come under long-term support (LTS) and all odd-numbered versions come under standard-term support (STS), which is almost 18 months.
Because .NET 7 is the odd version number, it is an STS release. You should only upgrade if you also plan to upgrade your code again in about a year when .NET 8 comes.

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