Upgrading to .NET 7

.NET is one of the fastest, easy to use and generally loved development platforms. It has an excellent ecosystem of development frameworks and remains one of the most trusted and supported platforms in the industry.

.NET 7 is the latest entry in this platform's successive versions and it brings increased performance and new features for C# 11/F# 7; upgrades to popular project types for web and mobile development and better support for containerized application development.

Download and Upgrade

You can download the .NET 7 SDK and runtime for here today.

For existing projects that are .NET Core 3.1,  .NET 5 or 6, you can make the following adjustments to upgrade to .NET 7.

1. In your csproj file for each project in the solution, change the target framework to net7.0

<TargetFramework>net7.0</TargetFramework>

2. Update Microsoft.* NuGet packages to the latest version. You may also update other third-party libraries as needed. In a larger project, you can right click the solution and manage NuGet Packages for Solution

* Note -

• If you have multiple versions installed in different libraries, you may need to consolidate in order to complete the upgrade.
• You might need to manually change the version of the packages to 7.0.0  in the XML of the csproj file.

• You may need to Clean Solution and Build in order to remove some compile time errors.

3. Once you have completed these steps, execute your brand new .NET 7 application!

What’s new in .NET 7

.NET 7 releases upgrades for the several products, libraries, and platforms including: ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, .NET MAUI, Windows Forms and WPF to name a few.

.NET 7 pushes the envelope a bit since its predecessor .NET 6 and is touted to boast:

• More performance enhancements
• Developer productivity enhancements
• Better cross-platform development support, with one code base.
• Container-first workflows
• Better cloud native application development and distribution tools
• Simplified C# code constructs
• C# 11 and F#7 language improvements
• Minimal API improvements
• HTTP/3 enhancements
• Enhanced support for Linux

.NET 7 release lifespan

.NET 7 is officially supported by Microsoft. It’s labeled as a Standard Term Support (STS) release that will be supported for 18 months. It will continue to receive support for up to six months after a subsequent STS or LTS release (or .NET 8).