First .NET 8 Preview version now available

Microsoft has released the first preview version of .NET 8, giving an early look at the next major version of the .NET platform.

As you might be aware, .NET 8 will become the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release, following .NET 6. The final release is expected later this year.

As expected, the early preview focuses heavily on performance, cloud-native scenarios, ASP.NET Core improvements, and developer tooling.

A few areas highlighted in Preview 1 include:

• native AOT improvements
• better container support
• performance work across the runtime and libraries
• new ASP.NET Core features
• continued cloud-native tooling investments.

One particularly interesting area is native AOT (Ahead-of-Time compilation), which continues to mature from the .NET 7 work. Native AOT aims to reduce startup time and memory usage by producing native executables instead of relying entirely on JIT compilation.

Installing the preview SDK is simple once the preview feed (or installer) is available:

dotnet --list-sdks

After installation, new projects can target .NET 8 directly:

dotnet new webapi -f net8.0

Remember: preview SDKs should generally be isolated from production build environments. Early preview releases can still contain breaking changes, tooling issues, or incomplete features.

Container-related improvements also continue receiving attention. Microsoft is investing heavily in smaller container images, startup performance, and cloud deployment scenarios, which matches the broader push toward Kubernetes and microservices deployments.

For ASP.NET Core developers, another notable theme is reduced overhead and lower allocation rates across the stack. Many of the improvements are incremental, but together they continue the steady runtime performance trend seen since .NET Core 2.x.

As usual with preview releases, the interesting part is less about individual features and more about seeing where the platform direction is heading for the next LTS cycle.

Happy .NET'ing!