.NET Conf 2025 - My Takeaways
Last week I attended .NET Conf virtually, and learned a lot. It was a 3-day event. I was only able to attend part of Day 1 as I had interviews happening that week, but there’s a lot of cool stuff that is new with .NET, and I wanted to share my thoughts here, as I usually do. 😀
.NET 10, C# 14 and VS 2026 are here
Microsoft released all 3 new versions on the first day of the conference. .NET 10 is much faster in requests per second than .NET 8 and also takes 93% less memory, which is huge! C# 14 has tons of new features, including the null conditional assignment operators (e.g. person?.Name = “Paul” and field ??= [];) and extension blocks, which are wrapper blocks that you can put extension methods into:
extension<TSource>(IEnumerable<TSource> source) {
... extension methods here ...
}
Extension blocks are useful if you have multiple extension methods in a class, as it reduces the code needed and scales well as new extension methods are added. There are so many new features of C# since 7 that I haven’t used in practice that it’s mildly stressful. 😅 Finally, Visual Studio 2026 is here, and it boasts a 44% faster load time over the previous version, so I am looking forward to downloading it.
New CoPilot features
The GitHub CoPilot agent that is included in VS 2026 has a couple new features that I thought are especially useful:
It has a .NET project modernization feature, so you can prompt CoPilot to upgrade an old .NET project to the latest version. I faintly recollect having to upgrade .NET projects to newer versions and it wasn’t fun, so this sounds incredibly helpful!
You can prompt CoPilot to build unit tests for you (only in the VS 2026 insiders build for now). I actually enjoy writing my unit tests, so I found this a bit controversial, but I bet it saves a lot of time and wouldn’t mind trying it someday.
What’s new with Blazor?
I’ve never created a Blazor project, as I instead discovered React around the time it became popular, but I’ve been considering using it in a new project just to learn how it works. Well, with .NET 10 there are a lot of new features for it. The big one for me was the improved hot reload, which I’ve noted in my research was a recurring gripe with users. Hot reload is now 92% faster, taking just 3 seconds. Additionally, they’ve fixed form validation to process all data annotations above a field instead of just the first one, and the new state persistence feature seemed very cool: when a user navigates away from a browser tab, that “circuit” becomes inactive but state is retained if they come back.
Aspire 13 is here! Wait, what?
What in the world is Aspire?! Before this conference, I had no idea it existed. It’s a platform you can set up locally to improve development, as it makes it easier to deploy, monitor and troubleshoot your apps. It includes an app host and has its own CLI. Seems to do some of the work a good ole’ IIS website would do. Will probably try it someday just to see if I find any value in it.
Conclusion
From what I was able to watch, this was a great conference with many good topics. The one thing that seemed weird was how friendly some of the Microsoft devs were with the vibe coding trend, which was gross. Overall, good job MSFT, I will be watching next year. You can catch all 3 days of this conference on the dotnet YouTube channel in case you missed it.
