.NET Conf 2026 is four days, free, and fully online, and it’s where .NET 11 officially launches. The first two days come from the teams at Microsoft who build .NET, Visual Studio, and Azure. The last two belong to the community. I’m hosting a two-hour segment on Community Day 1, Thursday, November 12, from 12:00 to 2:00 PM PST (2:00 to 4:00 PM CST), and I’d love for you to join.

Event Details

Dates: Tuesday, November 10 - Friday, November 13, 2026
Hours: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM PST (10:00 AM - 7:00 PM CST) each day
Where: Online and free. Register at aka.ms/dotnetconf2026, full agenda at dotnetconf.net.

• Tuesday, November 10: Product Team Day 1. The .NET 11 launch keynote, then deep dives on C#, ASP.NET Core, Aspire, AI, the runtime, and more.
• Wednesday, November 11: Product Team Day 2. Visual Studio, Blazor, MCP, WinUI, Azure, and EF Core.
• Thursday, November 12: Community Day 1. Community speakers all day, including the segment I’m hosting.
• Friday, November 13: Community Day 2. A second full day of community sessions.

Keynotes

Opening Keynote

Scott Hanselman and Damian Edwards | Tuesday, November 10 | 8:00 AM PST / 10:00 AM CST

This is the .NET 11 launch. Scott and the .NET team walk through what’s new in .NET 11, how the platform keeps moving the apps you already have forward, and how Copilot and agents are changing the way we build. If you only watch one session all week, make it this one.

Visual Studio Keynote

Mads Kristensen | Wednesday, November 11 | 8:00 AM PST / 10:00 AM CST

Mads opens day two with a tour of what’s changed in Visual Studio, what you can do with it today, and a peek at what’s coming next. It’s followed directly by The State of AI in Visual Studio and What’s new in Visual Studio, so plan on the whole morning.

Sessions I Wouldn’t Miss

All times are PST. Add two hours for Central.

Tuesday, November 10

• 9:00 AM: What’s new in C#, Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell. Union types are finally coming to C#, along with closed classes and extension indexers.
• 11:00 AM: The .NET AI Stack: What’s New, What’s Next, and How It Fits Together, Luis Quintanilla. A practical mental model for model abstractions, retrieval, tools, agents, and local inference in .NET.
• 12:00 PM: C# Dev Kit 11: Faster Foundations for .NET Development, and What Comes Next, Drew Noakes and Emanuel Fernandez Dell’Oca. C# Dev Kit rebuilt for speed: big workspaces that took over a minute now open in seconds, five back-end processes consolidated into one Native AOT server, and incremental builds.
• 1:00 PM: What’s New in Aspire for .NET Developers, Maddy Montaquila and Damian Edwards. What the Aspire team learned taking it beyond .NET, and what that means for the .NET workflow.
• 2:30 PM: .NET 11 Numerics, Tanner Gooding. IEEE 754 decimal floating-point types, BFloat16, generic complex numbers and random APIs, plus faster and more correct System.Numerics.Tensors.
• 3:30 PM: .NET Runtime vNext: Memory Safety and Runtime Async, Richard Lander and Andy Gocke. Two of the biggest runtime changes the team has ever shipped.
• 4:00 PM: Post-Quantum Cryptography with .NET 11, Jeremy Barton. The expanded post-quantum crypto support in .NET 11, how to use it today, and how Microsoft is preparing for what’s coming.

Wednesday, November 11

• 8:30 AM: The State of AI in Visual Studio, Rachel Kang. A new agent harness built on the Copilot SDK, more models and providers to choose from, and more control over how AI is configured across your .NET workflow.
• 9:00 AM: What’s new in Visual Studio, Jason Chlus. A demo-driven tour of the everyday improvements: code navigation, editor customization, build and test, and Markdown and web file support.
• 11:00 AM: What’s new in the MCP C# SDK, Stephen Halter. Stateless requests for scalable servers, multi-step user input, and the latest protocol revision.
• 12:00 PM: Building the future of agentic UI with Blazor, Daniel Roth. Blazor AI components, AG-UI, Microsoft Agent Framework, Foundry, and Aspire working together for human-in-the-loop experiences.
• 1:00 PM: GitHub Copilot modernization, Mika Dumont. An end-to-end agentic .NET upgrade, including where the agent hands control back to you.
• 2:30 PM: Azure’s new lineup for .NET developers (Part 1), Matt Soucoup and Paul Yuknewicz. Some of Azure’s newest services for .NET developers, shown live: a Container Apps sandbox, AI Gateway, SRE Agent, and Copilot canvases.
• 3:00 PM: Azure’s new lineup for .NET developers (Part 2), Matt Soucoup and Paul Yuknewicz. The second half goes deeper on Copilot canvases in the editor and AI Gateway.
• 3:30 PM: C# File-based apps turned up to 11!, Damian Edwards. Faster launch times, app-to-app references, richer package references, and broader dotnet CLI support, so a single .cs file can grow into a real tool without a project file.
• 4:00 PM: .NET + Foundry: Better Together, Bruno Capuano. A demo-heavy look at the latest in Microsoft Foundry and what’s actually worth using in your next C# app.
• 4:30 PM: EF Core 11: Vector Search, Smarter LINQ, and a Friendlier dotnet ef, Jiri Cincura. Vector and full-text search on SQL Server, FullJoin, MaxBy and MinBy, and leaner SQL.

Thursday and Friday are packed with community talks on Aspire, Blazor, security, testing, architecture, and AI. A few I’m especially looking forward to: Wesley Cabus on Device Bound Session Credentials (Thursday, 11:30 AM), Steve “Ardalis” Smith on Clean Architecture and modular design (Thursday, 2:00 PM), and Cam Soper on infrastructure as actual C# code (Friday, 2:30 PM).

My Segment: Community Day 1

Thursday, November 12 | 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM PST / 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM CST

I’m hosting four back-to-back community sessions. I’ll introduce the speakers, keep us on time, and bring your questions in.

Async Rx.NET

Ian Griffiths | 12:00 PM PST / 2:00 PM CST

Async/await support for Rx.NET shipped in preview back in 2023 and hasn’t moved much since. That’s changing. Ian shows Async Rx.NET in action and the work underway to make it ready for real use.

Silent Superpowers: Why Breaking Production Isn’t Scary Anymore

André Silva | 12:30 PM PST / 2:30 PM CST

Feature flags separate shipping code from releasing features. André covers trunk-based development, dark launches, canaries, and A/B tests, then shows OpenFeature, the vendor-neutral standard for flag management, running with Aspire and flagd.

The Most Overengineered Pocketwatch Ever Made

Ed Charbeneau | 1:00 PM PST / 3:00 PM CST

A pocket watch that runs a real-time voice agent, built in a week with Claude Code. Ed walks through the ESP32-S3 audio pipeline, echo cancellation, and barge-in, then connects the device to Azure OpenAI or your own ASP.NET Core endpoint in Azure so the logic lives in .NET.

Developer Workflows in AI Age - Local or Cloud

Sam Basu | 1:30 PM PST / 3:30 PM CST

Local or cloud models, IDE or terminal or browser, specs or ad hoc, skills, sub-agents, MCP, and how to validate what the AI built. Sam brings an honest look at real-world agentic workflows and the guardrails that make them work.

Event Highlights

• The official launch of .NET 11, straight from the teams who built it.
• Two keynotes, two product team days, and two community days, all free.
• Heavy coverage of AI and agents across the stack: the .NET AI stack, MCP, agentic UI, Copilot modernization, and Aspire’s agent-first toolchain.
• Local .NET Conf events continue through January 15, 2027. Want to run one? Here’s how to host.
• A sponsor swag bag giveaway you can enter on the .NET Conf site.

Register and Connect

• Register free: aka.ms/dotnetconf2026
• Full agenda: dotnetconf.net/agenda
• Follow along with #dotnetconf
• Watching this week? Tell me what you’re tuning in for on X/Twitter, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, and send your questions for my Thursday speakers.