.NET Core 3.0 was released in September 2019, followed by the LTS (Long-Term Support) version .NET Core 3.1 in December. Microsoft’s messaging was clear at that time:
- .NET Core 3.1 is the recommended version of .NET for all new applications.
- Existing .NET framework applications do not need to be upgraded to .NET Core. The .NET framework will remain supported as an integral part of Windows.
- If you want to port your existing .NET framework applications to .NET Core, there is no reason to wait any longer. Porting old application models to .NET Core is complete. The application models that have not yet been ported, will not be ported in the future.
Since then, Microsoft has been working hard on the next version – .NET 5. New preview versions have been regularly available for download and testing since March 2020. The final version was released on November 10th, 2020.
Editorial Note: This article has been updated and republished to incorporate the latest .NET 5.0 release in Nov 2020.
.NET 5 – Original plan
When .NET 5.0 Preview 1 was released in March 2020, Microsoft revealed its plans for this version.
The plan was to unify all .NET runtimes into a single .NET platform with unified base class libraries (BCL) for all application models: ASP.NET Core, Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, Xamarin, Blazor.
This would make .NET a unified platform for all types of applications. A single native device project would support Windows desktop, Android, and iOS development. A single Blazor project would support applications running in a browser, on a mobile device, or in a desktop application.
Performance would continue to be the focus: faster algorithms, improvements to the RyuJIT (just-in-time) compiler and garbage collector, smaller executables for faster startup times, and so on.
.NET 5 Plan updates at Microsoft Build
In May 2020, at the Microsoft Build conference, Microsoft unveiled changes to the original plan for .NET 5.
Due to the ongoing global health pandemic, the unification of all the .NET runtimes was postponed to .NET 6 which is planned for release in November 2021. .NET 5 would still be released in November 2020 but would focus on (performance) improvements of .NET Core 3.1.
Editorial Note: You may want to read Microsoft Build 2020 for Developers – Recap.
Figure 1: .NET runtimes before the unification in .NET 6
New target frameworks in .NET 5
In preparation for the runtime unification in .NET 6, .NET 5 already ships with an updated approach to target framework versions. These are specified with the so-called Target Framework Monikers (TFMs), i.e. short code-names that identify the set of APIs a project is targeting. You can see them used in any new SDK-style .csproj project file:
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework>
</PropertyGroup>
Before .NET 5, every .NET runtime had its own set of TFMs, for example, netcoreapp3.1 for .NET Core 3.1 and net48 for the .NET framework 4.8. The .NET Standard had its own set of TFMs, e.g. netstandard2.1 for .NET Standard 2.1. The latter had to be used for libraries that are shared between multiple runtimes, e.g. .NET Core and Xamarin.
With .NET 5, net5.0 remains as the only TFM. The net prefix instead of netcoreapp is used as this is the only version of .NET that is still under development. The renaming is also consistent with the renaming of .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5.
The net5.0 TFM is also the successor of the netstandard TFMs. With only a single .NET runtime remaining, there is no need for new versions of the .NET Standard that define a subset of APIs available across different runtimes. The full set of .NET 5 APIs will be available for all application models, including Xamarin, once it runs on top of this new unified runtime as is currently planned for .NET 6.
This means that regular .NET Core libraries are consumed by all application models.
Application models that target a specific operating system are able to provide additional APIs in addition to the full .NET 5 API set. Their TFMs consist of the prefix that defines the core .NET set of APIs and a postfix indicating the operating system the additional APIs target, for example:
- net5.0-windows provides additional APIs for the Windows operating system, such as WinForms and WPF.
- net6.0-ios will provide additional APIs specifically for the iOS operating system after the runtime unification. These are currently available as part of Xamarin.
Not all supported operating systems need their own TFMs. If no platform-specific APIs are supported (current examples are Linux and WebAssembly), the .NET runtime prefix is used (e.g. net5.0).
Figure 2: .NET runtimes after the unification in .NET 6
Single file applications
In .NET 5, a new publish type was introduced that outputs the complete application and all its dependencies (optionally including the .NET runtime) as a single file to be distributed. This feature is fully supported only on Linux.
On Windows nad macOS, the single-file goal wasn’t fully achieved. The executable still needs additional files at runtime. There is an option (not recommended for general use) to include these files in a single distributable file, but they are extracted as separate files the first time the application starts.
Further development and refinement of the feature are planned for future releases of .NET.
Performance improvements in .NET 5
A lot of work has been done to achieve better consistent performance. It is measured using the P95 latency metric, which is the 95th percentile of the latency value, meaning that 95% of requests have a latency below this value. The RyuJIT compiler and the garbage collector have the greatest impact on this metric:
- The tiered compilation is an approach that enables faster initial compilation by not performing any optimizations the first time a method is compiled. Methods that are used frequently can then be recompiled with higher quality by applying additional optimizations. In .NET 5, such methods are now better identified by call counting. Methods with loops receive special treatment by being optimized immediately because of the high impact they could have even if they are called only once.
- RyuJIT contains many other code generation improvements. A special category of these improvements is hardware intrinsics, i.e. support for targeting specific instruction sets of certain processors (e.g. SSE and AVX).
- Garbage collector enhancements help reduce application pause times when garbage collection is running and optimize garbage collector’s scanning of managed memory for candidates to undergo garbage collection.
In addition to that, many APIs are also being optimized for better performance, most notably:
- HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2 implementation,
- regular expressions, and
- string operations.
Cloud-native support
Several changes are specifically aimed at improving performance in container workload scenarios:
- All around better .NET performance in container environments.
- Reduction of the size of published images and a bigger selection of available images.
- Support for orchestration APIs such as OpenTelemetry to make it easier to work with .NET in such environments.
ARM64 support
.NET Core 3.1 was already available for Linux ARM64 and had full functional parity with the x64 version. In terms of performance, however, it was not on parity. To change that in .NET 5, several important investments were made in this area:
- JIT (just-in-time) compiler optimizations for ARM64.
- Support for ARM64 hardware intrinsics, i.e. specialized instruction sets.
- Tailored performance-critical algorithms for ARM64.
There was no native support for Windows ARM64 in .NET Core 3.1 which meant that all .NET Core and .NET framework applications could only run in x86 emulation mode on these devices. In .NET 5, full native support for Windows ARM64 (on devices such as Surface Pro X) is provided, both for development and for running applications. The initial release doesn’t include the Windows Desktop component (Windows Forms and WPF). There are plans to add it in a future update.
ASP.NET Core
There aren’t that many changes in ASP.NET Core.
Kestrel is bringing performance improvements for HTTP/2 thanks to newly supported HPack header compression. It also supports binding to new endpoints on configuration changes without the need to restart the application.
SignalR Hub filters allow code execution before or after the Hub methods. That is how middleware works for HTTP requests.
Although Blazor WebAssembly continues to run on the Mono runtime, it switched to .NET runtime libraries which give it higher compatibility until the common .NET runtime will finally be used in .NET 6. Performance was also significantly improved compared to Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.
Entity Framework Core
Entity Framework Core 5.0 is technically not part of .NET 5, although it was released at the same time. The library is distributed in the form of standalone NuGet packages that are fully compatible with .NET Standard 2.1, which means that they are also compatible with .NET Core 3.1. This is still a change from Entity Framework Core 3.0 which is .NET Standard 2.0 compatible and even works with the .NET framework.
Most improvements in Entity Framework Core 5.0 belong in one of the following two categories:
- SQL query generation works in more cases and generates better queries.
- More options are available when describing the database model in code.
Language Updates
.NET 5 is also accompanied by some changes to the supported programming languages:
- C# 9 brings several new language features focused on improving the experience of working with immutable data structures and enabling terser code in general. The most notable changes are the introduction of the long awaited record types and further improvements to pattern matching.
- F# 5 focuses on improvements in interactive and analytical programming to make the Jupyter notebooks experience even better.
- Visual Basic will not develop further as a language. To facilitate porting of Visual Basic based .NET framework applications, more project types work with Visual Basic in .NET 5: Windows Forms, and WPF, in addition to Class Library and Console applications which were already supported in .NET Core 3.1. No new features of .NET Core that would require a language change will be supported in Visual Basic.
C# Source Generators
Although not necessarily a language enhancement or part of .NET 5, C# source generators are closely related to both. This Roslyn compiler feature adds meta-programming support to C#. Like analyzers, source generators have access to the application code but are able to generate additional C# source files that are included in the final compilation. In many cases, this technique can replace Reflection calls at runtime and IL weaving, for example, to automatically implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface.
Getting started with .NET 5
.NET 5 is generally available since November 10th 2020. If you haven’t started using it yet, now is a good time!
You can download the latest .NET 5 release from the .NET website. You can use it with the Visual Studio 2019 16.8 or later, with Visual Studio for Mac or with the latest version of the C# extension for Visual Studio Code.
As an additional assurance of .NET 5 quality, Microsoft has been running 50% of the load to its .NET website on the latest .NET 5 release since .NET 5.0 Preview 1. This is another way for them to get realistic performance data right from the start. When you visit the website, you can always see the runtime it was served by in its footer. Now it’s always .NET 5. But even before the final release, you could refresh the page a few times, and sooner or later you hit the .NET 5 runtime. See Figure 3.
Figure 3: .NET website running on preview of .NET 5
Conclusion
Due to the delays caused by the ongoing pandemic, .NET 5 doesn’t yet bring a unification of all the .NET runtimes as originally planned. However it still brings a lot of improvements, especially in terms of performance.
Although .NET 5 is only a Current release and not an LTS (Long-Term Support) one like .NET Core 3.1 is, it can still make sense to upgrade your existing .NET Core 3.1 projects to take advantage of performance improvements and make your transition to the .NET 6 LTS release next year easier.
This article has been editorially reviewed by Suprotim Agarwal.
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Damir Arh has many years of experience with software development and maintenance; from complex enterprise software projects to modern consumer-oriented mobile applications. Although he has worked with a wide spectrum of different languages, his favorite language remains C#. In his drive towards better development processes, he is a proponent of Test-driven development, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment. He shares his knowledge by speaking at local user groups and conferences, blogging, and writing articles. He is an awarded Microsoft MVP for .NET since 2012.