.NET 8 Preview 2 brings Blazor performance boosts

Microsoft’s second preview of its planned .NET 8 software development platform enhances the ASP.NET Core web framework with a high-performance grid component and improved WebAssembly performance.

Microsoft .NET 8 Preview 2 was released on March 14 and can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com.

ASP.NET Core highlights in the new .NET 8 preview include a high-performance Blazor grid component, called QuickGrid, to display data in tabular form. It offers capabilities such as sorting, filtering, paging, and virtualization. Blazor is a framework for building client-side web user interfaces in C#.

.NET 8 Preview 2 also improves the performance of Blazor WebAssembly through the use of “jiterpreter”, a new runtime feature in .NET that enables partial JIT (just-in-time) compilation support in the .NET IL interpreter. The jiterpreter optimizes the execution of the interpreter bytecodes by replacing them with small snippets of WebAssembly code.

.NET 8 Preview 2 follows .NET 8 Preview 1, released on February 21. Overall, .NET 8 is set to bring new capabilities in areas like Linux and JSON, as well as full-stack web programming through ASP.NET Core. General availability of .NET 8 is scheduled for November.

Other ASP.NET Core improvements in .NET 8 Preview 2:

• A parser is being introduced to provide a warning if developers try to resolve more than one body parameter in a minimal API. Multiple FromBody attributes are detected.
• A new API, TryWriteAsyncin ProblemDetails supports more resilient integrations.
• The performance of the named pipe transport has been improved.

In addition to ASP.NET Core improvements, .NET 8 Preview 2 includes the following new library features:

• Extensions have been introduced to the validation attributes built into System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.
• He RequiredAttribute now allows you to validate that structures are not equal to their defaults.
• He LengthAttribute can now be used to set lower and upper bounds for strings or collections.