Home Automation is one of my hobbies, and today (September 8th) I had the pleasure to give a talk on this. Fortyfive minutes filled with home automation. Because of the many questions and the enthusiastic attendees that turned into an hour.

.NET 11 Release Candidate 1 is now available. This is our first release candidate, which comes with a go-live support license so you can confidently use this release for your production applications. This release of .NET 11 is supported in the new Visual Studio 2026 Insiders release alongside Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit. Check out the full release notes below and get started today.

This release contains the following highlights and improvements.

Libraries

• Signal processes and inspect termination status
• Experimental caller-driven TLS sessions
• DNS record resolution on Linux
• JSON support for new numeric types and binary schemas
• JSON closed-type polymorphism and union support
• Async options validation
• Construct BitArray values from spans
• Reuse compression encoders and decoders
• TLS channel binding on Unix
• Faster authenticated encryption on Apple platforms
• AES Key Wrap support
• Breaking changes
• Bug fixes
• Community contributors
• Full Release Notes

Runtime

• In-process crash reporting on Unix
• Half operations use FP16 hardware instructions
• Full Release Notes

SDK

• dotnet test improves mobile application testing
• dotnet test adds run-level controls and result layouts
• Container publishing produces reproducible images and skips redundant uploads
• File-based programs add Native AOT reuse and formatting support
• dotnet format limits configuration discovery to included files
• Additional CLI improvements
• Full Release Notes

MSBuild

• Create and extract tar archives
• Expose item glob patterns to build tooling
• Full Release Notes

NuGet

• Pack reuses existing project evaluations
• Vulnerable package updates work with warnings as errors
• Full Release Notes

C#

• C# 15 stabilizes unions and other language features
• Unsafe Evolution refinements
• Full Release Notes

F#

• Record spreads
• Record constructors
• Direct delegate construction
• Efficient interpolated strings
• Reflection-free record and union formatting
• Full Release Notes

ASP.NET Core

• SignalR authentication refresh APIs are finalized
• SignalR TypeScript client supports authentication refresh
• Blazor Server circuits update after authentication refresh
• OpenAPI reflects obsolete APIs
• Select an environment for build-time OpenAPI
• Negotiate authentication uses TLS channel binding
• Full Release Notes

.NET MAUI

• Testing
• Controls
• Platform features
• XAML
• .NET for Android
• Apple platforms (.NET for iOS, Mac Catalyst, macOS, tvOS)
• Full Release Notes

Windows Forms

• Manage kiosk-style experiences
• Modern visual styles stabilize for RC 1
• Full Release Notes

Get started

To get started with .NET 11, install the .NET 11 SDK.

If you’re on Windows, we recommend installing the latest version of Visual Studio 2026 Insiders.

You can also use Visual Studio Code and the C# Dev Kit extension with .NET 11.

Join a .NET community standup

Join us each week and engage with the developers and product managers behind .NET for community standups.

.NET 11 Discussions

The team has been making release announcements alongside full release notes on the dotnet/core GitHub Discussions.

Stay up-to-date with .NET 11

You can stay up-to-date with all the features of .NET 11 with:

• What’s new in .NET 11
• What’s new in C# 15
• What’s new in ASP.NET Core
• What’s new in Entity Framework Core
• Breaking Changes in .NET 11
• .NET 11 Releases

The post Announcing .NET 11 Release Candidate 1 appeared first on .NET Blog.

The .NET Conf 2026 Community Days call for presenters is open! Submit your session proposal between September 8 and October 6, 2026, for the opportunity to share what you have learned with the .NET community.

This year, the community is taking an even larger role in shaping and running .NET Conf. If you have built something interesting, explored a new technology, learned lessons through experience, or found a better way to solve a familiar problem, we would love to hear from you.

Four days of .NET

As we shared in the .NET Conf 2026 announcement, the conference brings together the people who build and use .NET.

The first two days will be led by the .NET team and broadcast live from Microsoft studios. You can expect the latest releases and announcements, together with deep dives from the people building .NET.

The final two days, November 12-13, are .NET Conf Community Days. Speakers will present remotely and may present in their own time zones. A community team led by Javier Lozano, working with members of the .NET Foundation board and others, will select the sessions, host the broadcasts, and run the event from start to finish.

In previous years, community sessions were selected and led by Microsoft’s .NET community team. For 2026, the Community Days are fully in the community’s hands, including talk selection, hosting, and production. This is an important step toward making .NET Conf even more of a community event.

What to submit

Great conference sessions often begin with something practical:

• A project you built and the decisions that shaped it
• Lessons you learned while solving a difficult problem
• A technology you explored and what you discovered
• A new approach to a challenge other developers may recognize

We are looking for 30-minute talks, including audience questions and answers, about building with .NET or software development practices. Topics can include web, native, mobile, desktop, AI, IoT, game development, containers and microservices, machine learning, data, DevOps, and .NET open-source projects. Sessions that demonstrate what you can do with .NET 11 are preferred, but any .NET-related topic or subject that interests developers will be considered.

Focus your proposal on work you are doing with .NET rather than duplicating product team announcements. Include information about yourself, your previous speaking experience, and links to presentation videos or other qualifications the selection team should consider. To make room for more speakers and topics, the team prefers to accept no more than one session per speaker.

Review the submission details on Sessionize, then tell us what you would like to share. Session proposals are open through October 6, 2026.

Help with Community Days

Speaking is not the only way to participate. The community team is also looking for volunteers to help behind the scenes with Community Days. If you would like to help, email volunteer@dotnetconf.net.

We are excited to see the sessions the community submits and to watch the community shape .NET Conf 2026. Submit your proposal by October 6, and we will see you at .NET Conf!

The post .NET Conf 2026 Community Days Call for Presenters Is Open appeared first on .NET Blog.

As the legal profession changes, the applications that support legal professionals must also change. The DataGrid can help you evolve.

The legal profession is going through enormous changes, some driven by changes in the business (e.g., outsourcing) and some by technology (AI). As a result, applications created for legal professionals like lawyers and paralegals have to reflect and support those changes.

For example, thanks to outsourcing, AI and more sophisticated third-party software, the amount of time a legal professional spends on research (once a key skill in the field) is shrinking. In the same way, legal professionals are now spending less time drafting legal documents (another formerly critical skill) and more time reviewing/correcting the products of various software systems.

Many things in the profession have not changed, of course. Today’s legal professionals still need to be able to understand their clients’ needs and analyze the issues each client faces. Legal professionals must provide solutions that are attainable while meeting their clients’ needs and be able to communicate the resulting courses of action (with their risks) both to their clients and the other parties involved.

Actually, here’s an interesting survey of legal professionals that the Progress ShareFile team put together. Lawyers love the work they do—but many still face workflow friction that slows client service, delays intake and creates unnecessary complexity. Of the participating legal professionals surveyed:

• 97% say AI and automation will be important to the future of legal
• 84% say workflow inconsistencies impact efficiency
• 95% want tools that are simple and easy to use

When it comes to executing the selected actions, much remains the same: filing deadlines remain critical, as do keeping clients compliant with relevant laws and advocating for clients’ interests in criminal and civil cases.

While the business has changed, clients have also changed and are increasingly using self-serve and lower cost options (e.g., community legal workers). When working with legal professionals, clients are increasingly assessing their experience by how the client’s interaction is personalized and customized to their needs. As a result, legal professionals are moving away from traditional hourly based billing toward value-based billing and are increasingly focused on efficiency.

The net result is an increased demand for “legal services” (contract life cycle management, for example) instead of “legal advice” like routine contract negotiation.

The Progress Telerik and Kendo UI DataGrid is an essential part of building applications that support those changing needs.

Retrieving and Finding Documents

For example, a legal case still involves thousands of documents: client records, meeting notes, case files, pleadings, affidavits, court filings, expert reports and more. Most of those documents are now digital assets, stored in various repositories that can be accessed through the DataGrid. Using the DataGrid’s virtualization features enables users to retrieve and review large numbers of documents quickly—essential in being responsive to clients’ needs.

The DataGrid offers multiple tools for filtering, sorting and searching for specific documents. Professionals can find documents by specific clauses, case IDs or document types, even across large repositories. The DataGrid AI-enabled Semantic Search even lets users find records just by typing in what they want (e.g., “Show me all the active cases”).

Once the relevant document is found, professionals can have multiple options in reviewing the document, depending on their needs. Documents can be viewed in the DataGrid, of course, but can also be reviewed in popup windows to show key information without leaving the current screen. Or users can navigate to a separate screen to view the document in full.

Organizing Documents and Data

Given the variety of documents, the DataGrid’s ability to organize those documents into groups is critical. The DataGrid can be configured to provide a predefined set of groups, and users can create their own groups as they need them by dragging and dropping columns in the grid.

Going beyond simple groups, the DataGrid can be configured as a hierarchy of document groups to organize documents by whatever criteria the user needs. Because the DataGrid has the ability to nest grids with different layouts within, for example, a document hierarchy, different document types can be displayed with different formats.

Some things remain constant, though. Even in the evolving world of legal professionals, time remains of the essence. While nunc pro tunc (“now for then”) can apply, it remains essential for filings to be made on time and correctly. DataGrid templates enable users, without leaving their current screen, to switch between a document-oriented view and a time-based view to see what’s pending (and conditional formatting can be used to highlight filings that still need development).

The DataGrid’s ability to organize any kind of data, in any order, to support any analysis is also essential to supporting the way the profession is evolving. Businesses now expect their legal departments to not only find ways to manage legal risk but also to provide strategic insights to improve revenues and decrease costs. Legal professionals increasingly need tools—like the DataGrid—that support exploring data to help them provide those insights.

For example, in the contract management area, clients now expect their legal representatives to be able analyze past performance of various terms in contracts to identify opportunities both for improving future contracts and renegotiating existing contracts (or identifying contracts that can’t be improved and should be terminated).

Sharing Data

Client confidentiality remains a key concern in any interaction with a legal professional. The DataGrid’s ability to integrate with code that authenticates and authorizes users to control access to data helps provide that. The DataGrid’s UI supports hiding columns, hiding whole rows and formatting individual cells hide information, all driven by the user’s authorized roles.

On the other hand, legal information often needs to be shared with others (courts, clients, other members of the office, opposing counsel). The DataGrid supports exporting selected rows or the whole grid in both Excel and PDF formats (these options can also be turned off to help prevent data from leaving the application’s secure environment). Any hidden rows, columns and obfuscated data remain hidden during export and, where necessary, custom code can be inserted into the export process to further control the process.

Updating Information

While reporting data is important, the DataGrid also provides excellent support for updating information efficiently. Users can update single rows, enter a “bulk update” mode that supports updating multiple rows, open popup windows for individual rows to improve the update experience or navigate from the DataGrid to full screen editing for any row.

The DataGrid also provides built-in validation to help prevent invalid data being entered and supports both synchronous validation (stopping the user from continuing until data is validated) and asynchronous validation (allowing the user to continue when validation is time-consuming but preventing updates when the user tries to save their data). Validation can be extended with custom code that can take advantage of the DataGrid’s error-handling support (displaying error messages in tooltips, for example).

In addition to providing multiple shortcuts that enable experienced users to work efficiently, the DataGrid supports WCAG accessibility guidelines out of the box. For occasional users, the DataGrid’s various assistants (AI Toolbar Assistant, AI Column Assistant, etc.), let users perform complex operations with natural language commands.

As the legal profession changes, the applications that support legal professionals must also change. The Telerik and Kendo UI DataGrid gives you the ability to support those evolving needs.

Check out the Telerik DevCraft suite of products to learn about the DataGrid in your favorite .NET or JavaScript flavor, like the Blazor Grid or the Angular Grid.

Get your hands on the whole suite free for 30 days:

Try Telerik DevCraft

Welcome to our combined .NET servicing updates for September 2026. Let’s get into the latest release of .NET and .NET Framework. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in our servicing releases:

Security improvements

.NET has been refreshed with the latest update as of September 8, 2026. This update contains security and non-security fixes.

This month you will find that these CVEs have been fixed:

Release changelogs

• ASP.NET Core: 10.0.12 | 9.0.20 | 8.0.31
• Entity Framework Core: 10.0.12 | 9.0.20 | 8.0.31
• Runtime: 10.0.12 | 9.0.20 | 8.0.31

.NET Framework September 2026 Updates

This month, there are new security and non-security updates available. For recent .NET Framework servicing updates, be sure to browse our release notes for .NET Framework for more details.

See you next month

That’s it for this month, make sure you update to the latest service release today.

The post .NET and .NET Framework September 2026 servicing releases updates appeared first on .NET Blog.