.NET 8 now available for RHEL and OpenShift

The .NET 8 release is now available, targeting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.9, RHEL 9.3, and Red Hat OpenShift. Here's a quick overview of what developers need to know about this new major release. 

New features in .NET 8

This release ships with the following features:

• The SDK supports using the latest C# (C# 12) and F# (F# 8) versions.
• The SDK now includes source link—which enables the debugger to find back the source code of the binaries used from the version control repositories—and it has built-in support for building container images directly from .NET projects.
• The base library, GC, and JIT have seen many performance improvements. Additionally, the libraries have better support for use with trimming and native AOT through source generators.
• .NET 8 comes with many API additions that improve performance, like the new FrozenDictionary and FrozenSet types optimized for “write once, read many'' scenarios, and the new IUtf8SpanFormattable interface that enables directly writing out a UTF-8 string representation for an object. .NET 8 also brings many enhancements to its JSON support.
• ASP.NET Core 8 enables server-side rendering of Blazor components. It improves the built-in identity authentication and authorization support. Also, minimal API and gRPC applications can now be built with native AOT.

How to install .NET 8

You can install .NET 8 on RHEL with the usual command:

# dnf install dotnet-sdk-8.0

The .NET 8 SDK and runtime container images are available from the Red Hat Container Registry. You can use the container images as standalone images and with OpenShift on all supported architectures:

$ podman run --rm registry.redhat.io/ubi8/dotnet-80 dotnet --version

8.0.100

Long-term support for .NET 8

.NET 8 is a long-term support release. It will be supported for 3 years, until November 2026.

The existing .NET 7 short-term support release is supported until May 2024, and the previous .NET 6 long-term support is supported until June  2024 (RHEL 7) and November 2024 (RHEL 8 and 9). Additional support life cycle details are available on the .NET Life Cycle page.