Microsoft & .NET.NETPreviewing .NET 6 - Exploring New Features

Previewing .NET 6 – Exploring New Features

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With the launch of .NET 6 Preview 1 last month, Microsoft added a lot of exciting new features. We looked at some of the improvements in an earlier article; here we’ll look at some of the new features in .NET 6.

Some of those new features include:

Let’s go into them one by one.

Blazor Desktop Apps

If you are familiar with Blazor, you’ll know that it’s a framework on which to build interactive client-side web User Interfaces. Blazor has been extended to enable you to write Blazor desktop apps. This empowers developers to create hybrid client apps that combine web and native UI together in a native client application.

Blazor desktop will have a WebView control that renders content from an embedded Blazor web server (serving either Blazor or other web content such as JavaScript and CSS). With Blazor desktop you can use Blazor and web technologies for all aspects of the client application experience, or you can use Blazor desktop for targeted functionality within a native app.

Blazor desktop is built on top of .NET Multi-platform App UI and it is primarily targeted at web developers that want to provide rich client and offline experiences for their users.

New Math APIs

.NET 6 will include new performance-oriented math APIs in the System.Math namespace. These new System.Math APIs are:

  • SinCos
  • ReciprocalEstimate
  • ReciprocalSqrtEstimate

Let’s have a closer look.

SinCos

As the name implies, SinCos allows you to compute Sin and Cos simultaneously. Sin and Cos often need to be calculated together, hence the (long overdue) need for this method.

Its signature in System.Math would look like:


	public (double Sin, double Cos) SinCos(double x);

It’s signature in System.MathF would look like:


	public (float Sin, float Cos) SinCos(float x);

ReciprocalEstimate

ReciprocalEstimate computes an approximation of 1 / x.

ReciprocalSqrtEstimate

ReciprocalSqrtEstimate computes an approximation of 1 / Sqrt(x).

Fast Inner Loop

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Microsoft has started a new project that they are calling Fast Inner Loop. The goal of the Fast Inner Loop project is to make the build run faster, creating systems to skip the build altogether, and enabling code edits to be applied to a live process without having to restart it (Hot Reload). Some of these features will hopefully be implemented in the runtime.

Apple Silicon Support

.NET 6 Preview 1 includes the first enablement of alpha-quality build Apple Silicon. Apple Silicon chips have two different modes: native and (x64) emulated. .NET 6 will have both Arm64 and x64 builds for macOS and only x64 builds for earlier .NET and .NET Core releases.

For a more detailed look at some of the new features of .NET 6, have look here.

Conclusion

Exciting times lie ahead for .NET developers with the coming of .NET 6. As more details become available, I will keep you updated.

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