Microsoft has released .NET 11, as part of the online .NET Conf under way today and tomorrow. It is not a long-term support (LTS) release though that detail does not mean all that much; it will be supported for two years, and if like me you upgrade soon after each new release everything is fine.
New features include union types in C# 15, faster asynchronous code, Core CLR on all platforms in place of Mono in MAUI (Multi-platform app UI), and hundreds of other improvements across the runtime and frameworks including ASP.NET Blazor and even the venerable Windows Forms.
Personally I am most interested in the performance improvements, and in the progress of .NET MAUI which after years of troublesome issues now looks to me a strong contender for cross-platform mobile and desktop development.
I like programming in C# and for me it hits a sweet spot of safety, performance and ease of use. Microsoft’s stewardship of the language and of .NET has been good in general, though it fumbled the handover to the .NET Foundation. There is still too much dependence on one company and despite the open source and cross-platform aspect, the technology remains associated with Windows which holds back adoption.
For further background on the inadequacy of the .NET Foundation check out this report from F# Software Foundation Executive Director Reed Copsey which says “I find myself unable to honestly recommend anybody put time or effort into the Foundation, or recommend joining as a member” and that “independence of the Foundation is disingenuous” thanks to bylaws that ensure that “the .NET Foundation is prevented, by design, from being able to self-govern and impact meaningful changes without direct support of Microsoft.”
The future of .NET is in largely in Microsoft’s hands and the question is where it will go now that programming is in the process of disruption by AI, a process which is still under way and the outcome of which is uncertain. If one takes the view that coding will largely be done by AI in future then programming languages and runtimes will change accordingly. We can see a little of how Microsoft is thinking about this with the introduction of WinUI Reactor, a framework for WinUI application using C# that is designed for agents as much as for people.
If we consider though the elements of the sweet spot I mentioned above, safety, ease of use, and performance, we may conclude that ease of use is no longer important (because humans are not using the language), and that for performance we should ask AI to use a system language such as C, C++ or Rust. And of these three, Rust is a winner because safety still matters, and AI is not immune from making memory safety mistakes.
I am therefore uncertain whether we will see the established yearly cycle of major .NET releases every year repeat for much longer. Microsoft may shift more investment towards AI and Rust.
That said, Microsoft has a strong track record of maintaining technology in use by its customers and developers can be confident that .NET and its various frameworks will continue to be maintained for long into the future.