Hello, I am Kenny Pflug

.NET 8 brings Native AOT to ASP.NET Core, but many frameworks and libraries rely on unbound reflection internally and thus cannot support this scenario yet. This is true for ORMs, too: EF Core and Dapper will only bring full support for Native AOT in later releases. In this post, we will implement a database access layer with Sessions using the Humble Object pattern to get a similar developer experience. We will use Npgsql as a plain ADO.NET provider targeting PostgreSQL.

Originally introduced in .NET 7, Native AOT can be used with ASP.NET Core in the upcoming .NET 8 release. In this post, we look at the benefits and drawbacks from a general perspective and perform measurements to quantify the improvements on different platforms.

.NET 8 introduces a new Garbage Collector feature called DATAS for Server GC mode - let's make some benchmarks and check how it fits into the big picture.