Author: David Ortinau
Typesetting: Alan Wang
.NET 8 Preview 6 introduces .NET MAUI, fixes 23 critical issues, and introduces Native AOT for iOS . Additionally, you can now use .NET MAUI in .NET 8 by installing the new .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio for Mac 17.6.1.
The new .NET 7 Service Release was also released successfully. See the release notes for details . Currently we are focusing on the quality of .NET 8, which means we will only release the most critical fixes for .NET 7. Once .NET 8 is generally released, we will re-evaluate the need to include fixes in service releases.
Fixes and Improvements in .NET MAUI
Several major desktop issues have been fixed: fonts ( #9104 , #13239 ), navigation ( #7698 , #15488 , #9938 ), tabs ( #12386 , #13239 , #6929 ), and file picker ( #11088 ) . We will also continue to improve memory management and resolve address leaks ( #15062 , #15303 , #15831 ).
.NET 8 Preview 6 introduces Native AOT (Ahead of Time Compilation) for iOS. What we can see after using this optional preview feature: Compared with Mono, the application size is reduced by 30-40%. If you're interested in getting better performance and space savings on the iOS platform, check out the details in the .NET 8 Preview 6 blog post .
Thanks to the 25 contributors (including the bot) who helped make this release, and especially the 5 brand new contributors to .NET MAUI: Michael Cao , Will Davies , @MartyIX , Larry Ewing , Filip Navara , and Ryan Davis .
For a full list of fixes, check out the release notes .
Introduction to VS Code (preview)
Today, we also released the .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code, providing a consistent cross-platform development experience for Windows, macOS, and Linux. For full details on the extension, check out Maddy Montaquila's blog post .
how to update
On Windows, Visual Studio 2022 now includes .NET 8 Preview and .NET MAUI Preview workloads. Please download the latest preview release (17.7 Preview 3), select the .NET Multi-platform App UI workload, and check the optional component ".NET MAUI (.NET 8 Preview)".
If you want to develop with Visual Studio for Mac on macOS, you can enable .NET 8 Preview in Preferences and install .NET 8 Preview 6 from the installer.
Download the .NET 8 Preview 6 installer , then install .NET MAUI from the command line:
dotnet workload install maui
Feedback welcome
We appreciate your feedback and contributions to .NET MAUI. You can report issues , suggest features , or submit pull requests on the GitHub repository . You can also join our Discord server or follow us on Twitter to stay updated with the latest news and updates.
Thanks for your support, and happy coding!