Nearly two years ago, I published an article detailing the upgrade of Bing’s central workflow engine (XAP) to .NET 5 from .NET Framework. You ca

.NET Performance Delivers Again for Bing, From .NET 5 to .NET 7

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2023-03-21 23:30:13

Nearly two years ago, I published an article detailing the upgrade of Bing’s central workflow engine (XAP) to .NET 5 from .NET Framework. You can see that post for a refresher on how XAP works and where it fits into the larger picture of Bing.

Since that time, XAP has remained a critical component underlying many search- and workflow-related technologies at Microsoft, and has played a central role for new integrations such as the new AI-powered Bing.

The expectations in both functionality and performance have grown, which means our reliance on .NET as a critical piece of infrastructure has only deepened.

In the last two years we have been early adopters of .NET 6 and .NET 7, and are now turning our sights to .NET 8. We find that each version is easier to upgrade to than the last. As a core platform team, we are strongly motivated by the performance improvements and new features that come with each version of .NET. By aggressively testing and upgrading to the latest version, and providing feedback to the .NET team, we can also influence their plans. Everybody benefits.

This article will highlight some of the major updates we made, the challenges, and ultimately the wins we realized as we aggressively kept up with the latest .NET releases.

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