Recapping C# and .NET in 2023: Announcements, Conferences, and best Blog Posts

We had a ton of stuff go down in the world of C# .NET this year. The big news was all about generative AI, ChatGPT, and Copilot, but the .NET team and the community didn’t take a sabbatical. We had loads of conferences, announcements, new frameworks, and cool tools. There was a fresh C# version release, a new .NET version, and plenty more. Yours truly went over all the 2023 announcements, the most popular conference sessions, the top tool releases, and the most-loved blog posts of the year. Here’s the lowdown on all these events, listed in the order they happened.

• January 23rd: 27th: NDC London
  • The Next Decade of Software Development - Richard Campbell
  • Don’t Build a Distributed Monolith - Jonathan “J.” Tower
  • Top 5 techniques for building the worst microservice system ever - William Brander
• February 10th: The .NET Frontend Day conference takes place. Topics include .NET MAUI, Blazor, SignalR, PWAs, Electron, and Azure Static Web Apps. Full recording here .
• February 15th: Introducing .NET Upgrade Assistant that helps upgrading your application to the latest .NET version inside of Visual Studio.
• February 21st: Announcing .NET 8 Preview 1
• February 21st: ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 8 Preview 1
• March 15th: Future Tech 2023 conference
  • Gerald Versluis: Real-Time Connected Apps with .NET MAUI, Blazor and SignalR
  • Future Tech 2023: Sander Molenkamp: Pub crawling in Orleans: exploring the Actor model
• March 16th: The most popular blog post of the year in reddit/r/csharp is a meme: When A .NET Developer Learns Blazor
• May 2nd: 4th: DEVIntersection conference in Las Vegas (no recordings available) takes place.
• May 8th: StackOverflow developer survey 2023 is out.
  • C# popularity remained at 8th place as it was at 2022, with 27.6% of the votes.
  • In database popularity, Microsoft SQL Server remained steady at 5th place, with about 27%. PostgreSQL takes the lead away from MySQL.
  • For most popular cloud, AWS is, as always, first with a big lead. Microsoft Azure is at 2nd place with 26%, and GCP is breathing down Azure’s neck with 23.86%.
  • ASP.NET Core is again at 6th place, with 16.57% of the votes.
  • Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio remain the most preferred IDE’s with 73.71% and 28.43% respectively.
• May 22nd to 26th: NDC Oslo conference takes place. See all recordings here .
  • Introduction to Actor-based Development with Project Orleans - Chris Klug
  • What’s new in C#?: Exciting new features in C# 9, 10 and 11! - Filip Ekberg
• June 29: Azure Lowlands 2023 in Utrecht, Netherlands. Full recording is here .
• September 13th: Stephen Toub publishes his traditional summary of performance improvements in the latest .NET version (.NET 8). Be warned, it’s the size of a small book.
• August 8th: The most popular reddit/r/dotnet blog post of the year: Does Moq in it’s latest version extract and send my email to the cloud via SponsorLink?
• August 14th: 2nd most popular reddit/r/dotnet blog post of the year: Who says .NET is tied to Microsoft ecosystem. I am legit using .NET very efficiently in NeoVim and Linux.
• August 28th: Announcing the New Foundational C# Certification with freeCodeCamp
• September 11th: 3rd most popular reddit/r/dotnet blog post of the year: Why isn’t dotnet core popular among startups?
• September 26th: James Newton-King publishes Debugging Enhancements in .NET 8 .
• October 4th: C# Dev Kit , a Visual Studio Code extension for C# development, becomes generally available. It’s getting VSC development much closer the one we’re used to with classic Visual Studio.
  • Adds a C# solution explorer
  • Run and debug tests using the Test Explorer
  • Many C# language features such as code navigation, refactoring, semantic awareness, and more
  • AI-Assisted development
• October 16th - 20th: NDC Porto
  • Correcting Common Async/Await Mistakes in .NET 8 - Brandon Minnick
  • Keynote: Language Games - Eli Holderness
• October 16th: Brennan Conroy publishes Performance Improvements in ASP.NET Core 8 .
• November 3rd: Jeremy Likness publishes What’s new with identity in .NET 8 .
• November 8th: Mads Torgersen announces that C# 11 is out! The new version includes, among other things, raw string literals, auto-default struct, required members, file access modifier, and list patterns.
• November 9th: Stephen Cleary explains new features in .NET 8’s ConfigureAwait.
• November 14th - 16th: The .NET Conf 2023 virtual conference takes place with over 100 sessions. Topics include new C# features, .NET 8, MAUI, Blazor, ASP.NET Core, .NET Aspire, and Azure Container Apps. See all recordings here . An elaborate list of the sessions here .
• November 14th: .NET 8 is released .
• November 14th: Visual Studio 2022 17.8 is generally available . Features include .NET 8 support , better GitHub Copilot integration, edit pull requests within Visual Studio, Summary Diff , and performance improvements .
• November 14th: Introducing .NET Aspire: Simplifying Cloud-Native Development with .NET 8
• November 14th: Announcing ASP.NET Core in .NET 8
• November 14th: Announcing .NET MAUI in .NET 8
• November 30th: JetBrains releases survey results about key trends for C#.
  • 74% of developers use the newest versions C# 10 or C# 11.
  • Just 16% and 12% of C# developers use Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly respectively.
• December 20th: Announcing .NET Aspire Preview 2 .