ML.NET 1.7.0 RC 1

Moving forward, we are going to be aligning more with the overall .NET release schedule. As such, this is a smaller release since we had a larger one just about 3 months ago but it aligns us with the release of .NET 6.

New Features

ML.NET

• Switched to getting version from assembly custom attributes- (#4512) Remove reliance on getting product version for model.zip/version.txt from FileVersionInfo and replace with using assembly custom attributes. This will help in supporting single file applications. (Thanks @r0ss88)
• Can now optionally not dispose of the underlying model when you dispose a prediction engine. (#5964) A new prediction engine options class has been added that lets you determine if the underlying model should be disposed of or not when the prediction engine itself is disposed of.
• Can now set the number of threads that onnx runtime uses (#5962) This lets you specify the number of parallel threads ONNX runtime will use to execute the graph and run the model. (Thanks @yaeldekel)
• The PFI API has been completely reworked and is now much more user friendly (#5934) You can now get the output from PFI as a dictionary mapping the column name (or the slot name) to its PFI result.

DataFrame

• Can now merge using multiple columns in a JOIN condition (#5838) (Thanks @asmirnov82)

Enhancements

ML.NET

• Run formatting on all src projects (#5937) (Thanks @jwood803)
• Added BufferedStream for reading from DeflateStream - reduces loading time for .NET core (#5924) (Thanks @martintomasek)
• Update editor config to match Roslyn and format samples (#5893) (Thanks @jwood803)
• Few more minor editor config changes (#5933)

DataFrame

• Use Equals and = operator for DataViewType comparison (#5942) (Thanks @thoron)

Bug Fixes

• Initialize _bestMetricValue when using the Loss metric (#5939) (Thanks @MiroslavKabat)

Build / Test updates

• Changed the queues used for building/testing from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 (#5970)
• Add in support for building with VS 2022. (#5956)
• Codecov yml token was added (#5950)
• Move from XliffTasks to Microsoft.DotNet.XliffTasks (#5887)

Documentation Updates

• Fixed up Readme, updated the roadmap, and new doc detailing some platform limitations. (#5892)

Breaking Changes

• None