Microsofts .NET 9 arrives, with performance, cloud, and AI boosts [Video]

Cloud-native apps, AI-enabled apps, ASP.NET Core, Aspire, Blazor, MAUI, C#, and F# all get boosts with the latest major rev of the .NET platform.

Credit: ABB Photo / Shutterstock

Microsoft has announced the general availability of .NET 9, a major upgrade of its open source software development platform that features scads of performance enhancements and new capabilities for building cloud-native and generative AI-enabled applications.

Released November 12, .NET 9 can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com.

The new .NET release features more than 1,000 performance-related changes across the runtime, workloads, and languages, along with more efficient algorithms to generate better code, Microsoft said. The Server GC has been changed to be adaptive to application memory requirements as opposed to the resources (memory and CPU) available in the environment (machine, VM, or container). Also, the runtime returned to vectorization, adding support for Arm64 SVE and Intel AVX10 silicon and hardware-accelerating the runtime. Dynamic Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), meanwhile, has been updated to optimize …