Chapter 1: Introducing .NET 5 Features and Capabilities
This book, as its title suggests, mainly features .NET 5 and all the related best practices that surround any major development processes for professional and enterprise applications. In this first chapter, I will summarize it for you to a great extent so that you get a top-level view at a glance.
We will take a look at how it all started with .NET historically, and through this, we will reflect on why .NET matters and what benefits we can obtain easily when choosing .NET as our primary development platform. Finally, we will see how long its technical support mechanism works for when we adopt .NET 5 as our main development platform.
While we will visit cloud-native apps topics later in this book in Chapter 4, Containerized Microservices Architecture, and Chapter 6, Upgrading On-Prem Applications to the Cloud with .NET 5, in this chapter, we will go deeper into .NET 5 features and the most useful performance improvements that we can leverage in all of our new applications and services. Since .NET 5 has been built on .NET 3.1, we will be revisiting some of the most significant capabilities offered from the previous version that are also still delivered perfectly and, in some cases, with enhanced performance by .NET 5.
In this chapter, we will be looking at the following major topics:
- Evolution of .NET
- Discovering the distinguishing factors in .NET versions
- What is the outlook for jumping to .NET 5?
- Types of applications developed using .NET
- What are .NET 5 headliners?
- Performance improvements
- .NET release schedule
- .NET support life cycle
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to see the history, the types of applications that are best built by .NET in certain environments for standalone as well as enterprise products. You will also be able to see and utilize the latest features of .NET and use the performance-oriented improvements directly in your new .NET 5-based applications and services.
