Announcing .NET 5.0 Preview 3

Richard

April 23rd, 2020

Today, we’re releasing .NET 5.0 Preview 3. It contains a set of new features and performance improvements. We’re continuing to work on the bigger features that will define the 5.0 release. The .NET 5.0 Preview 1 post covers what we are planning on building for .NET 5.0. Please take a look at the post and the dotnet/designs repository and share any feedback you have. And, of course, please install Preview 3, and test your workloads with it.

You can download .NET 5.0 Preview 3, for Windows, macOS, and Linux:

ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also being released today.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.6 to use .NET 5.0. Install the latest version of the C# extension, to use .NET 5.0 with Visual Studio Code. .NET 5.0 isn’t yet supported with Visual Studio for Mac.

Release notes:

Let’s look at some of the improvements in Preview 3.

Code quality improvements in RyuJIT

Every release includes a set of changes that improve the machine code that the JIT generates (we call this “code quality”). Better code quality means better application performance.

System.Text.Json improvements

.NET SDK Support for .NET Framework Assemblies

The .NET SDK will now auto-reference the Microsoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies NuGet package given a .NET Framework target framework in a project file. This change enables building .NET Framework projects on a machine without the required .NET Framework targeting pack installed. This improvement is specific to targeting packs, and doesn’t account for other dependencies that a project may have.

Closing

Please take a moment to try out Preview 3, possibly in a container, a VM. We’d like your feedback on the quality of the release. There is a lot more coming, over the next several months, leading up a November release.