Microsoft’s second preview of its planned .NET 8 software development platform spruces up the ASP.NET Core web framework with a high-performance grid component and enhanced WebAssembly performance.

Microsoft .NET 8 Preview 2 was unveiled March 14 and is downloadable from dotnet.microsoft.com.

ASP.NET Core highlights in the new .NET 8 preview include a high-performance Blazor grid component, called QuickGrid, for displaying data in tabular form. It offers capabilities such as sorting, filtering, paging, and virtualization. Blazor is a framework for building client-side web UIs in C#.

.NET 8 Preview 2 also improves Blazor WebAssembly performance, using the “jiterpreter,” a new runtime feature in .NET that enables partial JIT (just in time) compilation support in the .NET IL interpreter. The jiterpreter optimizes the execution of interpreter bytecodes by replacing them with tiny bits of WebAssembly code.

.NET 8 Preview 2 follows .NET 8 Preview 1, unveiled February 21. Overall .NET 8 is set to bring new capabilities in areas such as Linux and JSON as well as full-stack web programming via ASP.NET Core. General availability of .NET 8 is planned for November.

Other ASP.NET Core improvements in .NET 8 Preview 2:

• An analyzer is being introduced to provide a warning if developers attempt to resolve more than one parameter from the body in a minimal API. Multiple FromBody attributes are detected.
• A new API, TryWriteAsync, in ProblemDetails supports more resilient integrations.
• Performance of the named pipes transport has been improved.

Aside from ASP.NET Core improvements, .NET 8 Preview 2 includes the following new library features:

• Extensions to the built-in validation attributes have been introduced in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.
• The RequiredAttribute now allows validating that structs do not equal their default values.
• The LengthAttribute now can be used to set lower and upper bounds for strings or collections.