Friday, January 30, 2026

Microsoft's Agent Framework drops a new .NET preview that tightens APIs for building C# AI agents with async-only threads, the new AsAIAgent helpers, and consolidated options. This post highlights breaking changes and fresh samples like Durable Agents plus package updates to Microsoft.Extensions.AI 10.2.0 and Google.GenAI 0.11.0 so you can plan a smooth upgrade.

Carl and Richard catch up with Gerald Versluis on where .NET MAUI stands today and what is landing with .NET 10, including quality, performance, and ease of use improvements. If you build cross-platform UIs, this podcast unpacks MAUI's near-term roadmap and how it plays with Uno and Avalonia to make shipping smoother in 2026.

Sasha Ivanova shares what is landing in the ReSharper 2026.1 EAP for C# devs, including smarter code generation that wires up LoggerMessage methods and a cleanup action that consolidates scattered extension members. This post spotlights inspections that catch ImmutableArray pitfalls and short-lived HttpClient patterns along with analysis speedups and a move from DPA to integrated performance monitoring so your code stays safer and your IDE feels snappier.

Nikola Metulev unveils winapp, an open-source Windows App Development CLI that takes the grunt work out of building Windows apps with .NET, C++, Rust or Electron. This post highlights one-command setup for manifests, certs and SDKs, adding package identity for debugging without full packaging, plus simple MSIX packing and easier paths to Windows AI and Windows App SDK features for C# developers.

Jamie Taylor chats with NBomber founder Anton Moldovan about bringing load testing under your C# roof using a simple lambda based approach instead of a custom DSL. This podcast compares end to end user journeys with microservice isolation, shows how to plug results into xUnit and CI, and pairs load testing with chaos engineering to build resilient systems.

Tom Deseyn shows how to containerize a .NET app with the .NET SDK, then run it as a reliable systemd service using Podman quadlets. This post explains why images simplify distribution and upgrades, how Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Systemd improves startup and logging, and what rootless containers, volumes, and a dedicated service user mean for safer day 2 operations.

Ajay Narkhedkar walks through modern C# pattern matching, showing how to replace brittle if-else ladders with expressive type, property, relational, logical, and positional patterns. This post leans on relatable scenarios like user roles, order statuses, and grading to show how you get safer casts, clearer intent, and tidier decision logic. Expect takeaways you can apply right away in APIs and business rules without the usual conditional spaghetti.

Rodrigo Bercocano do Amaral unpacks a sneaky perf killer in EF Core: ad-hoc queries that pollute SQL Server's plan cache. In this post he shows how use counts in the plan cache reveals poor plan reuse, why interpolating values into FromSqlRaw causes single-use plans, and how LINQ or FromSqlInterpolated keep queries parameterized. The guidance is especially useful on Azure SQL where instance-level tweaks are limited, helping you keep CPU and memory steady.

FracturedJson tackles the age-old choice between minified and pretty-printed JSON by formatting like a human would: inline when simple, compact multiline for arrays, and table-style alignment for similar objects. In this post, you'll learn the heuristics and options like MaxInlineComplexity and MaxTableRowComplexity that make diffs, logs, and config files easier on the eyes while staying compact, plus how comments can be preserved. It is available as a .NET library along with a browser formatter, VS Code extension, and more.

Ali Hamza Ansari benchmarks minimal APIs in .NET 8 and .NET 10 to show how the new LTS and C# 14 make request pipelines snappier. By combining JIT and GC improvements with practical tweaks like static lambdas and AllowOutOfOrderMetadataProperties, this post demonstrates lower latency and allocations, plus faster endpoint selection in ASP.NET Core. If you want to see which small changes yield big wins in real API scenarios, this post walks through reproducible benchmarks and code.

Nick Randolph shows how to pair Uno Platform with VS Code and Model Context Protocol agents to have AI scaffold and iterate on a real cross platform C# app. This post is a practical look at making agents genuinely useful for .NET UI work, from new project templates to AI guided UI refinements.

Dig into span-based string concatenation and why it can be a tidy performance boost in hot paths. This post compares using ReadOnlySpan with string.Concat overloads to the usual + and StringBuilder, highlighting where allocations disappear and throughput improves. You get practical guardrails on when the span approach pays off and when simpler options are perfectly fine.