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Curious what's new in modern C# and how it impacts your day-to-day development? In this @VisualStudioLive session from Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2026, Jason Bock walks through the evolution of C# and highlights practical features that can simplify your code, improve performance, and boost developer productivity.
This session goes beyond just C# 14—covering key enhancements across recent releases so you can write cleaner, more expressive code today.
🔑 What You'll Learn
• How C# has evolved from early versions to modern features powered by Roslyn
• Project setup wins: SLNX solution files, Directory.Build.props, and central package management
• Why you should turn on analysis mode and treat warnings as errors
• Modern syntax: raw string literals, switch expressions, tuples, and expression-bodied members
• How to reduce boilerplate with records and implicit usings
• New capabilities: the field keyword, IParsable, static abstract interface members, and pattern matching
• Source generators: how they outperform reflection-based libraries like Moq
• Brand new in C# 14: the extension keyword for properties, static members, and generics
• What's coming in C# 15, including unions and runtime async
⏱️ Chapters
01:50 C# language evolution and history
04:37 Roslyn and the shift to open source
08:24 Feature velocity: 5 features/year to 13 features/year
12:41 Visual Studio 2026 project setup
14:26 SLNX solution files and Directory.Build.props
18:00 Use Artifacts Output
20:07 Analysis mode, warnings as errors, and central package versioning
24:11 Implicit usings and the Control+Period shortcut
26:48 File-scoped namespaces and EditorConfig
29:40 Backing field, lowercase code analysis tool,
32:10 Primary constructors, and Visual Studio smudges
34:27 Tuples and expression-bodied members
38:17 Raw string literals (C# 11)
44:44 Switch expressions and pattern matching
49:05 IParsable and static abstract interface members
52:15 Nullable reference types
56:05 Records
59:14 Source generators and the Rocks mocking library
1:03:48 New extension keyword in C# 14
1:07:34 C# roadmap: unions, extension indexers, runtime async
1:10:44 AI, C#, and why language knowledge still matters
👤 Speaker
Jason Bock (@jasonbock)
Staff Software Engineer, Rocket Mortgage
🔗 Links
• Download Visual Studio 2026: http://visualstudio.com/download
• Explore more VS Live! Las Vegas sessions: https://aka.ms/VSLiveLV26
• Join upcoming VS Live! events: https://aka.ms/VSLiveEvents
#csharp #dotnet #visualstudio #visualstudio2026 #VSLive
