As every year, we closely follow the most relevant conference in the .NET ecosystem. NetConf 2025 arrives with major announcements in performance, cloud native, AI and tooling, so lets go through the highlights.
Table of contents
0 - Introduction to NetConf 2025
We have been saying it for a while now, .NET is not a framework, it is an ecosystem that developers love and companies trust to build complete applications and systems in production.
This year, Microsoft shared official usage data for Visual Studio for the first time: 7 million active developers. A huge number, and that is without counting those who use alternative IDEs like Rider.
Since .NET was open sourced in 2015, there have been 290,000+ pull requests and 68,000 unique contributors in the official repositories. A clear indicator of the health and strength of the ecosystem.
On top of that, C# has stayed in the Top 5 languages on GitHub since 2020.
.NET keeps growing, consolidating itself and proving that going open source was one of Microsofts best strategic decisions.
1 - Release of .NET 10
The main focus is once again performance. Microsoft compared .NET 10 against .NET 8 (the latest LTS version) using Minimal APIs, a key piece of modern development in .NET, and the results are spectacular.
By simply upgrading from .NET 8 to .NET 10, you get:
- 93% less memory usage
- Up to 15% more performance
These improvements are not magic , they are accumulated optimizations across multiple areas of the runtime, JIT, GC, networking, serialization and more. If you are coming from .NET Framework, the jump is even more significant.
Throughout this blog post we will see more new features that come with .NET 10.
2 - Aspire in .NET 10
Aspire has become one of the strategic pillars of the .NET ecosystem. Since it was introduced in November 2023, it has not stopped growing and maturing.
I use it in my day to day work on projects focused on distributed systems, and the value it adds is huge.
This year was the first session after the initial announcement, which only shows how important it is for the .NET team.
Note also the name change: it is no longer .NET Aspire, just Aspire.
The goal is clear: a cloud native platform that can run applications regardless of whether they are written in .NET, Python or JavaScript.
Even so, the platform is built with .NET technologies: backend in C#, frontend in Blazor and extensions via NuGet. It is an expansion of the ecosystem, not a replacement.
In practice, integrating services, observability or cloud components is now simpler and more robust. The overall developer experience improves noticeably.
If you have not tried Aspire yet, I recommend you do. When it came out, it was basically a project similar to my Distribt project, where it provided certain abstractions. Today it is an orchestrator for different types of applications and systems that also runs in the cloud (Azure) and is very powerful.
3 - Artificial Intelligence
AI was, as expected, one of the central topics of the event. I am going to keep this section short and to the point, but in the conference itself probably around 50% was AI.
Microsoft went deeper into the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), a key piece of its vision for intelligent applications and part of what I cover in my AI with C# course.
We saw many, many talks on MCPs and the different MCPs that Microsoft or Microsoft partners have built.
Of course, we also saw how to build integrations in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, or how those MCPs work with Copilot. Sessions on agents, intelligent applications , using AI to help you code, design, document, and so on.
4 - Visual Studio 2026
After four years, the new version of Visual Studio is here, Visual Studio 2026.
The IDE by definition for the vast majority of developers in the .NET ecosystem, the new version is faster, smarter and fully integrated with .NET 10.
You can especially feel that it is faster when opening solutions, something that those of us working on large projects will notice.
As we saw in the Visual Studio specific talks, the integrations it has are not only with the language; AI plays a very important role inside the IDE. The way we develop has changed, Artificial Intelligence is key and we can clearly see this in the new version, with support for agents, MCP, GitHub Copilot for tests, for profiling, for organizing work, and even a version to help you modernize an app (GitHub Copilot app modernization).
In fact, we were able to see an example of the GitHub Copilot app modernization tool. With two clicks, Copilot analyzes the entire app and gives you a plan for how to migrate it:
That said, this process does take time; in this case it took 40 minutes. Afterwards we saw other sessions about the profiler, tests or more specific features.
The AI integrations are not the only thing it brings. It also includes a new interface that looks lighter and more friendly, which we already reviewed on the blog a while ago, and many other improvements, such as code coverage in the Community and Professional editions, Mermaid support, and a large number of new features, so I really recommend everyone to download it.
5 - Release of C# 14
As every year, we get a new version of .NET, in this case .NET 10, which comes with C# 14, an LTS version (3 years of support). Besides improving performance, it brings a series of new features that can be very useful in our day to day work.
The session itself was three hours into the event, showing that Microsoft prioritizes Aspire or Copilot ahead of its flagship language. I am not criticizing it, just pointing it out, but even so, the session was very focused on code.
This year, the language improvements themselves are much more obvious than in previous years, so much so that on this blog we have covered quite a few of them, such as the null conditional assignment or the new field keyword.
And it does not stop there, because now C# can also run as a scripting language:
It may not seem like much, but lets be realistic: how many times do we need a script to do X or Y, something very small, and we end up writing it in Bash/PowerShell and it is the only thing in that language within our codebase? Many, many times. With this feature that will no longer be necessary.
6 - Other ecosystem news in .NET 10
The .NET ecosystem brings a lot of new features and we do not always get big announcements for everything, so here is a recap of the rest.
Needless to say, everything includes performance improvements, which ultimately means running applications more efficiently, more cost effectively and without wasting unnecessary resources.
To read more about these performance improvements, here is the official .NET page where everything is explained. And just like last year, we had a session specifically about this, which was very educational.
Before going into each individual section, I also want to mention that there was a talk on security and how CVE scores work, which I found very interesting.
6.1 - What is new in ASP.NET Core and Blazor in .NET 10
Honestly, the talks, especially the ASP.NET Core one, felt more like a sales talk than a technology session. The most notable thing is probably the native integration with PassKey. Special mention that in one of the presentations they were using ProblemDetails with default support for Minimal APIs.
6.2 - What is new in cross platform apps, MAUI, WinForms, Windows apps in .NET 10
In this edition we saw progress focused mainly on quality, stability and developer experience in the desktop and cross platform application ecosystem in .NET: performance improvements, fixes and a simplified experience for developers.
In the case of .NET MAUI, what stood out most was the collaboration with Uno Platform, where MAUI acts as a backend and Uno (or Avalonia) can serve as the UI layer. This hybrid model opens up new possibilities for cross platform applications that want more flexibility in the visual layer while keeping the power of the .NET ecosystem in the core.
The strongest emphasis in this section was on XAML, with significant improvements to speed up development:
- Global namespaces to simplify code
- Source generators dedicated to XAML, delivering a noticeable performance jump in debugging and tooling scenarios
The data shown is real. It does not mean that your final application will use 99% less memory, but it does drastically reduce the memory required to debug certain components, for example going from around 100 MB extra to around 1 MB in some cases. A very practical improvement for everyday work.
In the Windows ecosystem, WinUI is now open source, which will boost its adoption and allow the community to actively participate in its evolution. The toolkit keeps improving and lets you build modern applications with an excellent visual result.
For WinForms, there was an improvement that went somewhat unnoticed but deserves a mention: better support for async/await in UI updates. Anyone who has worked with WinForms knows how hard it was to update the UI without blocking the main thread; this change modernizes the development experience in a big way.
And yes, as in practically the entire conference: AI integrated into development, tooling and productivity, just in case it was not already clear that it is a cross cutting priority.
6.3 - Microsoft Testing Platform
Microsoft Testing Platform is one of those technologies I had heard about but had not tried personally. That is why this session was especially interesting, to understand its current state and what is new.
The first obvious improvement is in the visual test execution interface. It is now much cleaner, with less visual noise and a clearer view of progress.
For example, successful tests no longer show their name by default, which significantly reduces log output and makes it easier to focus only on the relevant cases.
Beyond the UI, the most interesting new feature is that Microsoft Testing Platform turns the .NET test system into an extensible platform, thanks to additional capabilities shipped through NuGet packages.
One of the most useful ones is the ability to automatically retry flaky tests, a common need in CI/CD environments.
Until now, retrying failed tests was a manual process; now this logic can be configured easily as part of the execution flow.
To explore the new options available, you just need to run:
dotnet test --help
The platform maintains full compatibility with MSTest, NUnit and xUnit.
It also introduces specific improvements for MSTest. One of the more interesting ones is the new MSTestAnalysisMode, which analyzes your tests to identify redundancies: duplicated tests, tests without real assertions or tests that do not add any new value.
This type of preventive analysis helps keep a more efficient, clean and sustainable test base.
6.4 - The ones that are missing
This year it was noticeable that there was no dedicated talk on Entity Framework Core, something that used to be common in previous editions where very significant performance improvements were presented. Most likely the project is already at a maturity stage where big performance jumps or disruptive new features are less frequent.
We also missed F#, which only appeared in one session on community day. Even though it is not a language I use daily, its absence in the main sessions is surprising and suggests that the ecosystem priorities are focused on other areas.
7 - Recommended talks from .NET Conf 2025
Community sessions at NetConf are usually very good, and although it is impossible to cover them all, here are a few that really deserve your attention:
- OpenTelemetry: Ideal to understand how to instrument your .NET applications with traces, metrics and logs, adopting modern observability standards.
- Uno Platform: A talk that showcases the new 2.0 platform that lets you build apps faster with an MCP agent that is an expert on your project.
- Godot with .NET: If you are interested in game development; in my case it is one of those topics I always want to look into but never have time.
- Retro Meets Modern: Live Coding on a Commodore 64 with C# : A fun and technical session at the same time, showing that nostalgia and modern technology can be combined to learn low level concepts, optimization and metaprogramming.
And this is only a small sample. The conference is full of other interesting sessions. I encourage you to explore over the next few days, or whenever Microsoft uploads the videos to YouTube, the sessions that interest you the most.
