Dot Net 6 preview 4 is out

Released at MS build, preview 4 for .Net6 is now available to download and play with. Here's how to get hold of it.

I was particularly interested in the support for Azure Durable Functions given that .Net 5 is lagging in that area especially after they were working fine in 3.1.

Part of my long time goal is to go serverless from front to back. I believe we are almost there and can deliver fast SPA (thank you Blazor) apps at the front end robust scalable API's and microservices at the back end (thank you Azure Functions) all with a C# codebase without entering the containerised world of Docker and Kubernetes.

We're a full 6 months away from GA (November 2021) but the preview looks pretty robust and Microsoft are using it in anger with its websites.

So where to begin. I tend to use Visual Studio on Windows for all my dev work so I'll focus on that for now.

You will need Visual Studio Version 16.11.0 Preview 1.0 as a minimum which can be installed alongside your current version. Community edition is fine and its free to use.

If you want to try out the Azure Functions on this preview you'll need to install v4 of Azure Functions Core Tools. However - You must de-install previous version first. That proved to be fun as there are many ways of installing and you must de-install with the same tool you used to install. I tried Chocolatey, npm to no avail, I then checked via "add/remove programs" and there it was - I must have installed as a windows download. A click later and it was gone.

At present you must use NPM to install:

npm i -g azure-functions-core-tools@4 --unsafe-perm true

double check you have the correct version

func --version

Follow the rest of the instructions and you should be good to go.

The roadmap for .Net Azure functions has been mapped out:

I'll be following up with a closer look at preview 4 shortly.