Supercharge Azure Functions with .NET 7 Support

The performance improvement in .NET 7 went into the core libraries, not to mention the improvements in Windows Forms and Entity Framework and beyond. It's the fastest .NET ever seen.

Cloud application developers can now use Azure Functions V4 in their .NET 7 applications that run in the cloud. You'll get full .NET 7 support for Azure Functions when using the new release.

The preview of .NET Isolated Workers model is underway. It's a major change, where functions are no longer tightly coupled to the runtime, but instead, you write your functions using .NET standard APIs, and the functions are then run on a separate process in the cloud.

By providing a flexible choice of .NET versions to work with, Microsoft says the isolated process approach helps prevent conflicts between multiple versions of the same assembly into the same runtime. Here are the benefits:

  • Dependency Injection: With this approach, programmers are able to use existing .NET behaviors to create a middleware for the process, allowing them to create a function app that is more scalable and maintainable.

  • Less conflicts: the functions are running in a separate process so there will be no conflict between different versions of the same assembly used by the host process.

  • Full Control: Developers have full control over the process. They can decide on the configuration to use, the middleware that will run, and even the database to use.

"Choose the isolated model if you're upgrading from .NET 5 Azure functions v3. This feature is available for preview in all Windows & Linux-based plans in addition to premium plans," Microsoft's Melony Qin said last week.

To try out the new functionality, you must update to Visual Studio 2022 to 17.4 Preview 1.0, which shipped a few weeks ago.

There is a lot of work planned to improve the isolated process functionality in the future.

More Information:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-7-comes-to-azure-functions/

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Arthur Wang

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