Exploring .Net Core 3.0, Whats New ?

“.Net Core 3.0” released on 23rd September 2019, with Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 has brought changes that are extremely useful to the developers. It supports the ASP.NET core web apps, Windows apps, Command-line apps, Windows forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and libraries.

Languages it supports are C# and F# with partial support to Visual Basic.NET.

Operating systems that support .Net Core 3.0:

• Alpine: 3.9+
• Debian: 9+
• openSUSE: 42.3+
• Fedora: 29+
• Ubuntu: 16.04+
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6+
• Oracle Linux: 7
• Linux Mint: 18+
• SLES Enterprise Linux: 12+
• macOS: 10.13+
• Windows Client Desktop: 7, 8.1, 10 (1607+)
• Windows Server: 2012 R2 SP1+
• Nano Server  1803

Installation on various supported versions of Windows:

•     Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016
•     Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
•     Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
•     Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
•     Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

.Net Core 3.0 to develop Visual Studio Apps:

• Update other packages in .NET Core framework.
• Windows users can use Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 and higher required to use .NET Core 3.0
• Mac users need Visual Studio for Mac 8.3
• Visual Studio Code users can benefit from C# extension.
• WPF designer is part of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3.
• Use any IDE of your choice.
• New project templates of .NET Core for Visual Studio can create new Windows Forms using .NET command.
• .NET Core 3.0 uses the WCF Web Service Reference Provider Tool on Visual Studio 2017 15.5 or later versions. It lets us discover the services hosted at a specific address, searched as a URL.
• Later Microsoft WCF allows selection of data type and client options. You can add the generated service reference code to the project in the Connection Services node.

.Net Core 3.0 to develop Desktop Apps:

Windows desktop applications receive cross-platform support that can perform better, and has new enhancements over the complete .NET framework.

Microsoft is helping us to deliver better performance and take control over the runtime. The promising language features and improvements in open source can assist in developing desktop apps using .NET Core 3.0. It allows you to run new and existing Windows desktop applications using the UI framework you select.

WinForms used through the WindowsAPI requires a native Windows Operating System as .NET Core Runtime does not support any of the platform-specific features on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

NuGet packages used for the desktop projects on Windows automatically reference a project and provide access to explicit APIs like WinForms, COM, Enterprise Services System, etc.

A new feature Tiered Compilation of .NET Core uses quick JIT compilation. This causes a quick and lightweight startup of an application. It can speed up the startup process. This can help with improving startup speed.

.NET Core 3.0 for Single Page Applications:

• Apply SPA frameworks along with .NET Core in a number of ways such as integrating with your project, middleware, or directory-based connection.
• Use Microsoft built middle for Angular and React.
• Integrate the Single Page Applications to the functionalities of your website or project.
• Selecting the methods is a matter of appropriateness as each method whether middleware or directory-based has certain limitations of platform support or dependency related complexities.
• Middleware is a freewheeling approach towards the SPA to remain in a subdirectory and work in isolation. It is a suitable option if you are creating a monolithic SPA, used for the single web page.

.Net Core 3.0 offers the following:

• .NET Core apps no more need .NET assembly.dll instead launch them with executable (.EXE) for specific app depending on the operating system.
• .NET Core 3.0 lets you deploy large workloads in production.
• Now program high-performance applications with contract-based RPC services in the applications or use open-source gRPC.
• This version includes C#8, WinForms and Entity Framework 6.
• Build desktop applications with the support of Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
• It will help to build cloud-native applications.
• Experience improved performance because of new JSON APIs to read/write and object model. It reduces efforts and increases performance with minimum allocations.
• JSON APIs address many similar or same scenarios consuming less memory, allowing it to execute faster.
• Leverage high performance of System .IO.Pipelines with Http Request and Response classes by using BodyReader and BodyWriter.
• API improvements include CancellationToken.Unregister, complex arithmetic operators, IPEndPoint parsing, Unsafe.Unbox,  and System.Buffers.SequenceReader.
• Build Cloud-native and container- based applications with .NET Core.
• Improvements in the Garbage Collector consume less memory now. It is advantageous when many applications are hosted and running on same server.
• Support for Raspberry Pi and ARM 64 enables IoT development and remote use of Visual Studio debugger. Chip supports ARM 32 on Windows and Linux, and ARM64 on Linux (kernel 4.14+)
• .NET Core 3.0 can utilize OpenSSL 1.1.1, 1.1.0, or 1.0.2 best version available on a Linux system, TLS 1.3 can reduce the round trips between the client and server this improves the connection time.
• Remove obsolete and insecure algorithms to improved security and have better handshake in the connection.
• AssemblyLoadContext is a new feature that enables a loader context to be unloaded for releasing the memory of static fields and the assembly both. It can dynamically compile, run, and remove code from the websites or scripting engines.
• IoT deployments can take advantage from .NET 3.0’s ability to use serial ports on Linux. These digital pins use a variety of protocols.
• Deployed apps have active sensors that can display, write text, interact with radios, or print the output messages or images due to the support available for GPIO, PWM, 12C, and SPI.
• From Windows,Mac or Linux machines using CLI – command line interface you  can build applications with an editor.
• .NET Core 3.0 has ability to AOT- ahead of time compile for improving performance of small native applications.
• .NET Core enabled on Docker to make .NET applications work predictably and competently in containers. Useful for the container configured with limited memory has smaller docker images and SDK images.
• The runtime will not take much advantage of CPUs. The thread pool that computes CPU do not compete amongst each other as adding and allocating more threads cannot increase the volume of data CPU can deal with.
• The memory usage of .NET benchmarks though reduced to half the performance has no negative impact.
• Ready to run (R2R) images of .NET Core 3.0 can improve the startup time of .NET core application. R2R binaries improve the performance by reducing the amount of work JIT whiles the application loads.
• C# is able to add more patterns, range/index, and nullable reference types. Annotating at the down most layer of the framework library makes it work faster to find the flaws in code that can lead to the null reference.
• C# 8 lets you define the default interface members without breaking current implementations of that interface.
• C# 8 can set up switch expressions, a terser syntax that returns a value and can fully integrate with pattern matching. It is not necessary to define a variable or explicit type for each of the cases.
• F# 4.7, the functional language is simplified syntax and implied yield expressions make working easier for the developers.
• Compile .NET into Web Assembly, to get desired speed in the browser for the client and server.
• Open-source for supporting machine learning to .NET from machine learning library is part of Microsoft products.
• Async streams lets you create and consume data in different occurrences and can help to retrieve the elements of data.
• MVC Service Registration has a strong support of AddControllers for building Web API, AddControllersWithViews. While creating applications that need Web API, and AddRazorPages for pages that use Razor templates.
• Index and Range are the new syntaxes. The Index can describe the array element access and depict direct data access. The Range consists of two index values that can produce particular a piece of data.
• Assembly linking can reduce the size of applications by trimming away the unused assemblies. The IL linker scans the applications for the code that is required else trims the framework libraries. This works as .NET Core consists of self-contained installations in apps that do not need users to install .NET for using apps.

Await more of .NET:

Microsoft will continue to fix the bugs, improve performance, enhance security, and raise standards of .NET framework. The updates of .NET Core 3.1 has a scheduled release in November 2019; the upcoming .NET Core full version update will be .NET 5.0.

The merger of .NET with .NET 5 will simplify the development process.

Wrap Up:

We see executable and performance improvements, C# 8 enhancements; open-source and long term support all this is inviting to migrate from lower versions to .NET Core3.0

Modernise the existing web, desktop and cloud applications or create appealing ones or make serverless apps, .NET Core 3.0 gives a life-cycle with the tools and services it propounds.