Getting Started With .NET 8: Seamless Setup With DevContainers

Find out how to take it for a test run!

Image by Midjourney

The relentless march of the .NET release schedule continues at an impressive pace! Even though the gloss on version 7 hasn’t had a chance to fade, version 8 stands on our doorstep, poised for release in November 2023. The .NET team has announced a wealth of new features to pique our curiosity. And to make sure we are all paying attention, they have already rolled out five preview versions.

I usually enjoy getting hands-on with new tools and technologies before they’re officially released, and .NET 8 is no different. However, this can lead to an accumulation of installed SDK versions, cluttering my development machine. To avoid this, I lean on DevContainers, which help me keep my dev environment clean and organized. In this post, I’ll walk you through this approach, illustrating how to use a DevContainer to explore all of the new features in .NET 8 while keeping your machine clutter-free.

As with all of my previous DevContainer posts, the prerequisites are:

• Docker
• Visual Studio Code
• The ‘Remote Containers’ extension for VSCode

All of the code is available here, but I’d encourage you to work through the process yourself to…