📢 Microsoft releases unified .NET 5.0, with a broad set of new features

Microsoft releases the next major version of the .NET Framework. The latest .NET Framework 5.0 also includes support for C# 9 and F# 5, along with a broad set of new features and improvements. With .NET 5 as the first release of unified implementation of .NET Framework, Microsoft targets a much larger group of developers to migrate their .NET code.

If you are looking for .NET 5.0, here you can get the links to download the latest version for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You will need Visual Studio 16.8 or later to use .NET 5.0 on Windows and the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac on macOS.

.NET 5.0 is the first release of Microsoft's .NET unification journey and has been built to enable a larger group of developers to migrate their .NET Framework code and apps to .NET 5.0. Microsoft also started contributing to .NET 6.0 that will enable Xamarin to support iOS and Android development.

Along with .NET 5.0, Microsoft also released ASP.NET Core, EF Core, C# 9, and F# 5, which you can now use to build production-ready applications.

You can now download .NET 5.0 installers and binaries for Windows, Container images, and Linux packages to start your journey.

To build applications using Visual Studio, make sure that you have the latest version of Visual Studio 2019 on Windows or macOS.

.NET 5.0 brings a ton of improvements including some performance improvements. Among those, Microsoft highlights a list of key features as mentioned below:

• .NET 5.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and Bing.com (version).
• Performance is greatly improved across many components and is described in detail at Performance Improvements in .NET 5.0, Arm64 Performance in .NET 5.0, and gRPC.
• C# 9 and F# 5 offer new language improvements such as top-level programs and records for C# 9, while F# 5 offers interactive programming and a performance boost for functional programming on .NET.
• .NET libraries have enhanced performance for JSON serialization, regular expressions, and HTTP (HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2). They are also are now completely annotated for nullability.
• P95 latency has dropped due to refinements in the GC, tiered compilation, and other areas.
• Application deployment options are better, with ClickOnce client app publishing, single-file apps, reduced container image size, and the addition of Server Core container images.
• Platform scope expanded with Windows Arm64 and WebAssembly.