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We’re excited to release .NET 5.0 today and for you to start using it. It’s a major release — including C# 9 and F# 5 — with a broad set of new features and compelling improvements. It’s already in active use by teams at Microsoft and other companies, in production and for performance testing. Those teams are showing us great results that demonstrate performance gains and/or opportunities to reduce hosting costs for their web applications. We’ve been running our own website on 5.0 since Preview 1. From what we’ve seen and heard so far, .NET 5.0 delivers significant value without much effort to upgrade. It’s a great choice for your next app, and a straightforward upgrade from earlier .NET Core versions. We hope you enjoy using it, on your desktop, laptop, and cloud instances.

.NET 5.0 is the first release in our .NET unification journey. We built .NET 5.0 to enable a much larger group of developers to migrate their .NET Framework code and apps to .NET 5.0. We’ve also done much of the early work in 5.0 so that Xamarin developers can use the unified .NET platform when we release .NET 6.0.

There are many important improvements in .NET 5.0:

.NET 5.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and Bing.com (version).
Performance is greatly improved across many components and is described in detail at Performance Improvements in .NET 5.0, Arm64 Performance in .NET 5.0, and gRPC.
C# 9 and F# 5 offer new language improvements such as top-level programs and records for C# 9, while F# 5 offers interactive programming and a performance boost for functional programming on .NET.
.NET libraries have enhanced performance for Json serialization, regular expressions, and HTTP (HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2). They are also are now completely annotated for nullability.
P95 latency has dropped due to refinements in the GC, tiered compilation, and other areas.
Application deployment options are better, with ClickOnce client app publishing, single-file apps, reduced container image size, and the addition of Server Core container images.
Platform scope expanded with Windows Arm64 and WebAssembly.