.NET 6 shipped on November 8th at .NET Conf 2021. It is an LTS release with three years of support. The features in .NET 6 represent the completion of the .NET unification effort that began with .NET 5 and the most significant performance improvements since the platform's inception.
Minimal APIs
Minimal APIs allow an ASP.NET Core web application to be defined in as few as four lines of code. No Startup.cs, no Controller base class, no complex dependency injection wiring required for simple cases. The pattern is borrowed from Node.js and Python frameworks and brings .NET into parity with the approachability of those ecosystems for simple services.
Hot reload
Hot reload allows code changes to be applied to a running application without a full restart. In practice this means editing a Razor view or a C# method body and seeing the result in the browser without stopping and restarting the app. The feature was controversial in its initial form (a Microsoft employee's pull request to disable hot reload in open source tooling triggered a significant community response) but the capability itself is genuinely useful.
MAUI on the horizon
MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) was announced as the successor to Xamarin Forms for cross-platform .NET native development, targeting iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows from a single codebase. MAUI shipped as a preview in .NET 6 with GA in .NET 6.0.1 in May 2022. The preview state was a realistic acknowledgement that the platform needed more polish.
The performance story
.NET 6 benchmarks show consistent gains across the board: startup time, throughput on the TechEmpower web frameworks benchmark, memory allocation reduction from the updated garbage collector, and JIT improvements. The runtime performance improvements in .NET 6 make it a compelling platform for latency-sensitive workloads where Java or Ruby alternatives have historically had an advantage.