Same procedure as every year: The latest .NET release packs new features. Lots of new features. These include C# 12 and (of course) new and improved BCL and framework library APIs. The updated versions of these libraries expand our toolbox further to aid us in solving engineering problems while also offering general performance improvements.

.NET 8 ships Frozen Collections, Inline Arrays, the long awaited Time abstraction, Date/Time deconstruction, more throw helpers, Random for memory, enhanced Data Annotations, additional operations for UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings, improvements to JSON serialization, plenty of additions to Hardware Intrinsics and Numerics, and much more.

So let's checkout the most prominent types and members in .NET 8 and put them to the (unit) test.