Announcing .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2

Richard

September 12th, 2018

Today, we are announcing .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2. We have great improvements that we want to share and that we would love to get your feedback on, either in the comments or at dotnet/core #1938.

ASP.NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 and Entity Framework 2.2 Preview 2 are also releasing today. We are also announcing C# 7.3 and ML.NET 0.5.

You can see complete details of the release in the .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 release notes. Related instructions, known issues, and workarounds are included in the releases notes. Please report any issues you find in the comments or at dotnet/core #1938.

Thanks for everyone that contributed to .NET Core 2.2. You’ve helped make .NET Core a better product!

Download .NET Core 2.2

You can download and get started with .NET Core 2.2, on Windows, macOS, and Linux:

Docker images are available at microsoft/dotnet for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

.NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 can be used with Visual Studio 15.8, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code.

Tiered Compilation Enabled

The biggest change in .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 is tiered compilation is enabled by default. We announced that tiered compilation was available as part of the .NET Core 2.1 release. At that time, you had to enable tiered compilation via application configuration or an environment variable. It is now enabled by default and can be disabled, as needed.

You can see the benefit of tiered compilation in the image below. The baseline is .NET Core 2.1 RTM, running in a default configuration, with tiered compilation disabled. The second scenario has tiered compilation. You can see a significant request-per-second (RPS) throughput benefit with tiered compilation enabled.

The numbers in the chart are scaled so that baseline always measures 1.0. That approach makes it very easy to calculate performance changes as a percentage. The first two tests are TechEmpower benchmarks and the last one is Music Store, our frequent sample ASP.NET app.

Platform Support

.NET Core 2.2 is supported on the following operating systems:

Windows Client: 7, 8.1, 10 (1607+)

Windows Server: 2008 R2 SP1+

macOS: 10.12+

RHEL: 6+

Fedora: 27+

Ubuntu: 14.04+

Debian: 8+

SLES: 12+

openSUSE: 42.3+

Alpine: 3.7+

Chip support follows:

x64 on Windows, macOS, and Linux

x86 on Windows

ARM32 on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04+, Debian 9+)

Closing

Please download and test .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2. We’re looking for feedback on the release with the intent of shipping the final version later this year.

We recently shared how Bing.com runs of .NET Core 2.1. The Bing.com site experienced significant benefits when it moved to .NET Core 2.1. Please do check out that post if you are interested in case study of running .NET Core in production. You may also want to take a look at the .NET Customers site, if you are interested in a broader set of customer stories.