.NET 10

Intro

I'm Peter and this is the RoguePlanetoid Podcast where you will find insights about Microsoft or related platforms and technology, along with so much more whether you are beginner or an experienced professional or just interested in technology. Keep Current, Keep Coding!

Welcome

Welcome to episode thirty-four of the RoguePlanetoid Podcast about .NET 10. .NET 10 is a supercharged SDK enabling faster code and reducing costs at scale for a platform developers love and businesses trust. .NET allows you to build any app including games, mobile, cloud, agent with AI or ML, web, desktop and IoT, but .NET is not the same as it was twenty-five years ago but has evolved to be a complete development platform that can help reduce costs and helps Microsoft at scale including Copilot, Xbox, and Bing. .NET 10 was launched at .NET Conf 2025 with a fantastic keynote kicking off the event followed by useful sessions covering a wide range of topics, to find out more about what was announced and to check out the sessions then visit dotnetconf.net or check out the link in the show notes.

.NET 10

.NET 10 is the latest long-term support or LTS release of .NET which will be supported for three years with updates which includes runtime improvements, new library APIs along with features such as support for standalone single-file based apps, enabling developers to build secure and future ready applications for todays and tomorrow's workloads. .NET is also driven by the community with over 290,000 pull-requests merged from over 68,000 contributors, including contributions from partners since .NET was made open source with over 23,000 pull-requests contributed to .NET 10 alone, with .NET being one of the top five high velocity open-source software projects.

.NET 10 is not just a feature update, but a definitive performance boost with many new features, runtime improvements, just-in-time compiler optimisations, improved garbage collector, support for cutting-edge silicon and more. .NET 10 library enhancements and improvements include first-class support for Model Context Protocol, new cryptography, globalisation, collection and diagnostics APIs, along with new JSON serialisation options and networking enhancements, plus security and cryptography enhancements such as support for post-quantum cryptography. To find out more or to download .NET 10 visit dot.net or check out the link in the show notes.

C# 14

C# 14 with .NET 10 enables faster and more elegant and extensible code to be created, with a whole host of new features delivering industry leading performance and improvements to help applications launch quicker, run smoother and scale more easily. C# 14 adds support for null-conditional assignment where you can perform conditional assignment to potentially null objects, field backed properties where you can access compiler-generated backing field without needing to define an explicit backing field, along with extension members which enable instance or static extension properties to be defined.

C# 14 also supports modifiers on simple lambda parameters, nameof support for unbound generic types, implicit conversion for span and readonlyspan, partial events and constructors along with user-defined compound assignment operators. C# 14 enables developers to be productive and provide a solid foundation to build apps that can leverage features and functionality in .NET 10. C# is the modern, innovative open-source programming language for building apps and is one of the top five programming languages on GitHub.

Aspire

Aspire, which was previously known as .NET Aspire, is the code-first extensible and observable method of orchestrating front ends, APIs, containers and databases, where you can define your stack in code that is type-safe, readable and debuggable to run and develop locally and then deploy to shift to real cloud services. Aspire integrations enables you to plug in any local or remote code or service using patterns to model anything, to see your entire stack running in one place with logs, endpoints, environment variables and even full open telemetry. Aspire is defined using C# which is extensible with integrations but expands beyond .NET including support for Python, JavaScript and more.

Aspire 13 is the latest and biggest release yet alongside .NET 10, with a unified infrastructure that enables a modern development experience with CLI enhancements, single-file AppHost support leveraging the single-file application support in .NET 10, and quicker onboarding enabling seamless build or deployment, plus static file support along with enterprise ready support for infrastructure and services, with flexible connection string and language agnostic certificate trust. Aspire can seamlessly move from single-file to project-based apps and now supports .NET MAUI, to find out more about Aspire then visit aspire.dev or check out the link in the show notes.

Agents & AI

.NET 10 builds upon a long history of .NET and bringing applications up to date with modern .NET can be challenging, from dependency conflicts to finding alternatives but the benefit of modernising apps is clear, including reducing security risks along with better performance and scale where can access a cross-platform runtime and libraries. This is where GitHub Copilot app modernisation comes in, where you can quickly and more easily upgrade .NET versions and associated frameworks with AI agents that can increase app performance, perform end-to-end code assessment and remediation for apps, including upgrading to .NET 10 or prepare for a cloud migration to Azure. Often applications don't have unit tests so GitHub Copilot testing will be available which will automate repetitive testing tasks and turn unit testing into a productivity boost where you can create and run tests without slowing your flow and enable you to ship faster.

.NET 10 enables developers to build intelligent applications intelligently, to create agentic .NET applications infused with AI-powered agents. Agents work with a large language model with instructions from input that can perform tool calls to produce output including messages for other agents. Microsoft Agent Framework will combine Semantic Kernel and AutoGen frameworks for a reliable, flexible and developer-friendly API, it will simplify agent development along with giving flexibility to build safe, responsible and robust AI powered applications. Tools using Model Context Protocol can be written or called that extend capabilities of large language models beyond their initial training, you can build your own MCP server using the MCP C# SDK, which is an official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol and many projects in Microsoft that support MCP use this SDK which can then be exposed and used by other MCP clients.

ASP.NET Core & Blazor

ASP.NET Core is the complete, modern web framework that is trusted by millions of developers and powers the world's largest services with industry leading performance and is the foundation of modern cloud applications including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot, Bing and Xbox. .NET 10 key focus areas for ASP.NET Core include making it easier to build secure apps, with targeted performance improvements and security improvements including support for Passkeys, which are cryptographic credentials that replace traditional passwords and are phishing resistant, easy-to-use and secure by design that are now supported in ASP.NET Core Identity. Improved observability and diagnostics are critical when monitoring a production service where can gather metrics that can be used with Aspire. Improved performance in ASP.NET Core comes with reduced memory utilisation in Kestrel, to reduce your application memory footprint that results in better scaling, lower idle cost and smarter resource usage. ASP.NET Core also includes minimal API validation and support for OpenAPI 3.1 with XML documentation comments-based OpenAPI descriptions.

Blazor enables modern web UI development with C# which is all .NET from frontend to backend, supporting server and client rendering leveraging reusable web components using HTML and CSS, including built-in and a marketplace of third-party components or extensions. Blazor can be used to build agentic UI with the .NET AI Chat Web App template, with support for streaming responses, markdown rendering, citations and suggested prompts along with flexible integration for GitHub Models, OpenAI and more, plus is retrieval augmented generation or RAG enabled for multiple vector stores including SQLite, Azure AI Search and more. Blazor is even better in .NET 10 with simplified security including integrating with Passkeys from ASP.NET Core using templates, and a new scaffolder for Entra ID authentication. Blazor features improved performance at startup and runtime, including preloading Blazor WebAssembly resources and runtime scripts plus faster runtime execution. Blazor state persistence enables improved reliability and state persistence with a new declarative model.

.NET MAUI, Modern Windows Development & Windows Forms

.NET MAUI enables developers to build native, cross-platform desktop and mobile applications with investments for .NET 10, including quality and performance improvements that make runtime and debugging faster, plus simplicity to make XAML easier to work with and maintain along with adopting more patterns such as supporting Aspire. .NET MAUI XAML simplification and modernisation includes global namespaces to reduce complexity, and other enhancements to make it more legible such as implicit namespaces as well as preview support for XAML source generation using Roslyn source generators to get faster debug runs, consistent UI on release and the ability to debug generated code along with faster inflation, less debug memory plus .NET MAUI is faster with less memory used on release. .NET MAUI in .NET 10 also includes a display save area API to accommodate display cut-outs and improvements to hybrid apps using JavaScript based frontends plus support for Xcode 26 and Android API 36.

Modern Windows Development is a large ecosystem with over a billion devices available and aided by resources including WinUI Gallery, which is an encyclopaedia of knowledge to help build apps including guidance on colour, typography and more from the Fluent Design system, to build great experiences which can not only be used in WinUI apps using Windows App SDK but also Windows Presentation Foundation apps. Windows Community Toolkit showcases open-source helpers, extensions and controls from the community that can be used. WinUI is being open sourced on GitHub to enable true community collaboration, to increase transparency and accelerate innovation plus reduce friction to improve agility with faster resolution of bugs and feature gaps. Windows App SDK which is the comprehensive library for building modern Windows applications now includes semantic versioning with major releases yearly and monthly minor releases with meta packages from full functionality to including what you need to reduce application sizes.

Windows Forms features for .NET 10 include enhanced dark mode support in Windows, including system-wide dark mode detection and automatic theming including a property for runtime queries, and system colours automatically adapt to dark or light themes, and can set this up at startup. Windows Forms with .NET 10 also includes customisation APIs to customise the window border colour and for supporting custom title bar background and text colour along with rounded, small rounding or no rounding on windows in Windows. Windows Forms in .NET 10 also features new analysers to catch common compile-time mistakes and async forms for non-blocking display of forms.

Conclusion

.NET 10 includes runtime improvements and new library APIs that can be leveraged by developers to create .NET applications that can be orchestrated with Aspire, plus be developed, enhanced or integrated using AI on platforms such as the web with ASP.NET Core with Blazor, or cross-platform with .NET MAUI or for Windows including WinUI with Windows App SDK, Windows Presentation Foundation or Window Forms. C# 14 allows .NET 10 developers to write cleaner and more concise code that is more expressive to create the applications and experiences they need, by evolving the C# language to be more efficient and flexible for todays and tomorrow's applications and workloads.

.NET 10 is a superpowered SDK that builds on what came before and AI makes it easier to bring legacy .NET applications up to date to take advantage of performance, security and other improvements. I've used .NET since the very first version released in 2002 and even versions before that in alpha and beta, plus beyond to every major version throughout .NET framework and modern .NET era with each version being better and more capable than the last. .NET 10 is a must have upgrade for .NET developers, along with being able to use Visual Studio 2026 which you can find out more about in episode thirty-three of the RoguePlanetoid Podcast or check out the link in the show notes.

Outro

Thanks for listening to the RoguePlanetoid Podcast where each episode you will find insights about Microsoft or related platforms and technology, along with so much more wherever you listen to your podcasts or at rogueplanetoid.com/podcasts for the RoguePlanetoid Podcast whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional or just interested in technology. Keep Current, Keep Coding!