Top C# Developer News of 2021

Year 2021 has been an awesome year for C#.NET developers.

In this blog post, I'd like to share the top C# developer news and share the best content from the .NET community.

C# 10

A new version of the C# language is always an exciting event in the life of a C# developer.

Every C# version always brings new way to write more elegant and succint code. In the entire history of C#, this version is probably the one that helped the most to reduce boilerplate code thanks to the fenomenal Global and Implicit Usings feature and file-scoped namespace declarations.

Personally, I think these improvements to using statements are the most impactful C# 10 features. Every new project should leverage them.

There are a tons of other interesting features added like record structs, labda expressions improvements, structs improvements and interpolated string handlers to name a few.

Learn more on what's new in C# 10 and read the official announcement post: Welcome to C# 10. Microsoft also made the C# Standardization Open Source.

Other useful links from the community:

• Records, Structs and Record Structs
• C# Records The good, bad & ugly 

Get the latest book C# 10 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference.

.NET 6

.NET 6 is the first long-term supported version of the new unified cross-platform .NET. It's the results of years of massive reengineering efforts from Microsoft and it's unbelievable how much the framework evolved since the first release of .NET Core back in 2016. 

We finally have a truly unified cross-platform development experience to build any applications using C# and .NET.

13 years ago I started my blogging journey in .NET and managed to get my first Microsoft certification on .NET Framework 2.0. It's truly amazing how far we have come over the last decade of innovations!

.NET 6 is also the most performant version of .NET. See Announcing .NET 6 — The Fastest .NET Yet and .NET 6 vs .NET 5: up to 40% speedup!

.NET 6 provides new APIs especially new useful LINQ operators, threading and async improvements. It's also nice that we finally have a Priority Queue in the base class library.

Use the .NET Upgrade assistance to upgrade your old .NET projects to the latest .NET 6.

Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64 bit version of Visual Studio. No more memory problems working with plugins like ReSharper!

With Hot Reload you can now modify your apps source code while the application is running, without the need to manually pause or hit a breakpoint. It's fantastic to speed the inner developer loop.

Testing tools for .NET in Visual Studio were also drastically improved.

Visual Studio Code continues to get better and better and it's now fully available on the web. Just visit vscode.dev.

ASP.NET Core 6

Minimal APIs revolutionize how to create microservices API in a short and compact way without using classic controllers. This was made possible thanks to the new lamdba expressions improvements in C# 10.

One of the best C# developer news is obviously Blazor, the game-changing framework to build client web apps with C# instead of Javascript. Blazor made giant leap forwards in terms of size and performance. Check the ASP.NET Core Blazor performance best practices guide.

You can also build cross-platform native apps using Blazor and .NET MAUI. This is not yet available for production but it's mind-blowing! 

Modern Microservices with .NET

.NET is a modern framework. It's built to work with Docker and from the ground up for scaling in the Cloud.

Learn how to build Microservices Applications using .NET and check some tips on how to dockerize Microsoft .NET Apps in Production, Deploying C# Web Applications with Docker and Staying safe with .NET containers.

Take a look at Project Tye to simplify the developer debugging experience when building microservices applications.

The official v1 of the Distributed Application Runtime (DAPR) was announced this year. Dapr is an open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge.

Check out the the book Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET to learn more.

Explore gRPC to write high-performance services in .NET 6. and YARP 1.0 for building fast proxy servers in .NET.

Miscellaneous C# Developer News

We barely scratch the surface of the amount of excellent content and news from the .NET development world.

Let me share some additional news and articles worth mentioning:

• F# 6 is officially here
• Code Analyzers in .NET 6
• Best Practice for Designing Interfaces in .NET
• Microsoft overtakes Apple to become the world's most valuable company
• .NET Tech community forum
• .NET Cambridge Meetup recordings
• The future of the .NET Foundation
• Windows 11
• How I become a Lead Software Engineer
• Stackoverflow Developer Survey Results
• EF Core 6
• Static Web Apps
• Ultimate List of C# Developer Resources
• The Future of Modern Application Development with .NET and Azure
• New JSON library (System.Text.Json)
• Cake 2.0 with C# 10 and .NET 6 support
• ASP.NET Core in Action Second Edition
• .NET Nano Framework
• .NET GC Internals
• Generic Math
• .NET 6 Networking Improvements
• What’s new for gRPC in .NET 6

What's next?

Microsoft announced that every year in November a new major version of .NET and C# will be released. We can expect a continuous flow of innovation and improvements to our loved technology. 

See the initial .NET 7 Planning and C# 11 Initial Triage.

Some of the candiate features for C# 11 are generic attributes, the field keyword, List patterns, static abstracts in interfaces, declarations under or patterns, records and initialization, discriminated unions, params Span<T>, statements as expressions, expression trees and type system extensions. Keep an eye on those Github issues. So much interesting stuff is coming our way!

Join the Productive C# Developers community on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date and meet passionate professional C# developers!

Don't forget to share this blog post with your social followers and colleagues.

This article was one of the 50 contributions to the C# Advent Calendar 2021. Thank you Matthew for the opportunity to share my love for C# and .NET.