Yesterday the first preview of .NET was released ahead of the official release in November. It is always exciting to explore the first preview as it will give a pretty good idea about the focus of the final version.

For .NET 9 the most important focus areas are cloud-native and intelligent app development (blogpost) making .NET development more productive using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit, and cloud deployments easier using Azure services.

.NET Aspire was announce back in 2023 and together with Native AOT, it has a key role in the cloud-native development platform in .NET 9 (if you haven’t looked at .NET Aspire or Native AOT yet, now is the time to dive into it).

It is no surprise to see AI being a key focus area in .NET 9, building intelligent applications leveraging the value of generative AI (and AI in general) through the .NET development platform. Developers will see a close collaborating on Semantic Kernel, OpenAI, and Azure SDK, making the development of intelligent applications a first-class experience in .NET based pro-code tools.

Personally, I have focused a lot on building intelligent application based on Semantic Kernel, OpenAI, and Azure SDK for the last year and I’m really looking forward to experiencing an even closer integration between the tools and the SDKs.

“.NET 9 is shaping up to be another major step forward for the platform. We’re delivering .NET 9 Preview 1 today and welcome your feedback on all the new features we’ve delivered.”

.NET Team, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/our-vision-for-dotnet-9/

Going ahead, documentation and release news regarding previews, can be found at docs and GitHub Discussions.

Happy coding – and stay awesome!