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Microsoft Ships New Preview of .NET 5, Already Handling 50% of .NET Site Traffic

In announcing today's second preview of the big, unifying .NET 5 that's going GA in November, Microsoft revealed the next-gen platform is already handling 50 percent of the traffic to the company's main .NET website.

Preview 2 doesn't contain much in the way of new features, but the announcement post by team program manager Richard Lander sheds light on Microsoft's testing procedure to put the new iterations through their paces in a real-world environment:

We're running 50% of the .NET Website traffic on .NET 5.0 as a test case, using Azure load balancing. We've been doing that since days after we released Preview 1. You may remember us doing something similar with .NET Core 3.0 and 3.1. By splitting the traffic 50/50, we can ensure that 5.0 gets consistently better with constant performance data available to us. This model keeps us honest, and it's also a great testing approach. We trust our most important site with ALL of our previews, in production (which we don't recommend for anyone else). That should make adopting our final release a pretty easy choice for you. The version number is in the footer of .NET website; feel free to check at any time.

As for new features and functionality, Preview 2 mainly includes a bunch of tweaks and improvements to the garbage collector and code quality improvements via changes to the machine code that the just-in-time (JIT) compiler generates.

"It contains a set of smaller features and performance improvements," Lander said. "We're continuing to work on the bigger features that will define the 5.0 release, some of which are starting to show up as initial designs at dotnet/designs."

Microsoft also detailed "ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 5 Preview 2" and there wasn't much happening there, either: "ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 Preview 2 doesn't include any major new features just yet, but it does include plenty of minor bug fixes. We expect to announce new features in upcoming preview releases."

Finally, Entity Framework Core 5.0 Preview 2 was also announced, featuring these highlights:

  • Use a C# attribute to specify a property backing field
  • Complete discriminator mapping
  • Performance improvements in Microsoft.Data.Sqlite

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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