Your favorite runtime just went to 11. Wait, no. It went to 10. And if .NET Conf 2025 taught us anything, it's that the future of .NET isn't just bright—it's ludicrously fast, filled with agents, and probably wearing a tiny, efficient hat.
The Big 10: Performance That Cheats (and We Love It)
Forget what you thought you knew about runtime performance. The .NET team has spent a decade strategically making everything faster. They've achieved the computational equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit is a 93% memory reduction and a 15% increase in requests per second compared to .NET 8.
- JIT is Your Best Friend, Now with Escape Analysis: The JIT compiler is now so smart it can prove your allocated objects never leave the local method, stack-allocating them and laughing in the face of the garbage collector). We saw demos where an
IEnumerator allocation simply vanished! Zero bytes allocated! That's right, the runtime is performing black magic to avoid heap pressure, leading to crazy fast enumeration over things like List<T> and Queue<T>.
- The Deabstraction Doctrine: High-level abstractions? Love 'em. But they have a tax. .NET 10 is ruthlessly removing that tax through better deabstraction, making high-level C# execute "with the efficiency of hand-tuned native code".
- Link is Learning: Turns out, Linq operators talk to each other now. So,
OrderBy().Contains() is no longer going to perform a full, unnecessary sort on a massive collection just to check for a single item. It's skipping the full copy/sort entirely, leading to near-instantaneous results. Don't touch a line of code, get a performance windfall. This is truly the good stuff.
C# 14: Syntactic Sugar and Extension Overlords
Dustin Campbell showed us that C# continues its mission to make our code cleaner and less like we're writing verbose Java. But the real debate was around Extension Members.
- Extension Members: The Final Frontier: We can finally stop debating extension properties! C# 14 introduces extension blocks that allow us to define extension methods, properties, and even operators (yes,
*= and += on collections!) that use instance syntax. This is a massive win for writing clean, discoverable APIs, even enabling static extensions like calling int.Range(10).
- Field-Backed Properties: The battle is over. You can now access a property's backing field using the
field keyword, which is perfect for lazy initialization and ditching redundant private fields.
- Null Conditional Assignment (
?=): A small feature with a big impact, preventing you from having to write annoying if (x != null) checks around property assignments.
🧠The Agentic Uprising (and You're the Puppet Master)
This year, if you didn't say "agentic" in a meeting, did you even develop software? The keynote confirmed: Agents are about action.
- Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF): This is the consolidation we needed. Semantic Kernel and AutoGen have merged into MAF, providing the foundational building blocks for building robust, interactive AI apps in C#.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): This is the USB for AI. Allie Barry and Mike Kistler showed how MCP provides a standardized, consent-based way for your LLM (like GitHub Copilot) to access real-time, private, and specialized resources, whether it's your internal database, GitHub issues, or Azure subscription status. They even showed building a custom MCP server for a leaderboard in Visual Studio.
- Agent Workflows: Jeremy Likness and Maria Naggaga demonstrated taking a simple multi-modal image analysis and turning it into a complex, multi-threaded business process (an art market strategy) using fan-out patterns in the Agent Framework. The framework even generates a Mermaid diagram of your complex agent orchestration!
Visual Studio 2026: Your AI-Powered IDE Sidekick
The new VS is decoupled from the platform, which means faster, monthly updates. It’s also loaded with AI tools to help you stop vibecoding and start intentcoding.
- Debugging/Profiling Agents: The VS team gave us the tools to stop guessing and start measuring.
- Copilot Profiler Agent: Run a benchmark, and Copilot spots the problem (like unnecessary boxing), proposes a fix, applies the code changes, and re-runs the benchmark to validate the performance gain, all without you leaving the chat window. They even found a real bug in the NLog open-source library this way.
- Debugger Agent: Got a failing unit test? Click "Debug with Copilot," and the agent will form a hypothesis, set temporary breakpoints, execute the fix, and re-run the test until it passes.
- ZAML Source Generation for .NET MAUI: David Ortinau showcased the quality focus on MAUI, including the launch of ZAML Source Generation. This translates into 1000% faster View inflation and a staggering 99% less debug memory usage. This fixes a decade-old problem with debug builds feeling sluggish due to reflection.
- Expert Agent (and Vibe-Coding a Presentation): Merrie McGaw and Klaus Loeffelmann literally had Copilot write their entire presentation application in WinForms from a set of markdown notes on a machine without PowerPoint, live on stage. They used the new Expert Agent feature, proving that yes, WinForms is still a thing, and now it supports dark mode and asynchronous operations (
Control.InvokeAsync).
Don't Hit Stop
The sheer volume of high-quality, high-velocity features is intimidating, and that's just Day 1. If you're building software, updating to .NET 10 and Visual Studio 2026 is definitely a thing. It's how you stay relevant in this agent-driven, high-performance world. Go download the new stuff, check out the resources, and get coding.