Some of the world's most important line-of-business applications are built on WinForms. They contain decades of domain knowledge, countless customer-specific workflows, and—in many cases—millions of lines of proven code. Rewriting them is rarely economical, and breaking their behavioral or designer compatibility is simply not an option. That is why WinForms must not change. But standing still would be just as dangerous. To remain the best platform for evolving these applications, WinForms must also reinvent itself as the migration tool that lets teams modernize without discarding their investment.

In .NET 11, that reinvention becomes visible. A new opt-in visual-styles generation gives controls modern metrics and appearance while preserving compatibility by default. Toggle switches, flash-reduced form startup, live Windows visual and accessibility settings, improved focus and text-scale handling, smoother batched UI updates, and new presentation capabilities help applications adopt today's Windows design language and accessibility expectations. The key is not to impose a disruptive new UI model, but to create deliberate conceptual seams inside existing applications: separating generated designer state from application logic, fixed layouts from adaptive layouts, synchronous UI mutation from responsive workflows, and irreplaceable business rules from replaceable presentation and infrastructure.

AI makes those seams actionable at a scale that manual modernization could never reach. The designer and runtime must give AI-supported development enough structure to understand a form, preserve its intent, and transform it safely. At the same time, WinForms applications need modern runtime foundations through which developers can add domain-specific copilots, intelligent workflows, and local or connected AI services without rebuilding the entire product. This session explores how .NET 11 turns compatibility from a constraint into a modernization strategy—and how WinForms can preserve decades of customer value while helping business applications become more adaptive, accessible, performant, and ready for the AI era.

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By popular demand (well, one person online), Barry returns with a summary of .NET's security bugs for 2025-2026, including things you, as a developer should do to avoid falling into the same deep pits.

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.NET developers have more AI building blocks than ever: model abstractions, data and retrieval, tools, agents, local inference, and the infrastructure that connects them. But how do these pieces fit together, and which ones should you reach for first?

In this session, we'll take a practical look at the evolving .NET AI stack: what's available today, the patterns emerging across the ecosystem, and where things may be heading next. Through a combination of examples and demos, we'll explore how the pieces can be composed into useful applications.

Whether you're just getting started or already building AI-powered software, you'll leave with a clearer mental model for navigating the .NET AI ecosystem and building what comes next.

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C# Dev Kit brings a rich C# development experience to VS Code. In version 11, we rebuilt its foundations to make that experience significantly faster and lighter. In our benchmarks, large workspaces that previously took over a minute to load now open in only a few seconds, while a new incremental build system makes common builds substantially faster.

In this session, you'll see these improvements in action and learn the architectural decisions behind them: how five back-end processes became one Native AOT server, how the design of that server changed, and how persistent caches avoid repeatedly computing the same information.

We'll also look beyond VS Code at how these foundations could support .NET development across editors, command-line tools, and agent-driven workflows—and how your feedback can help shape what comes next.

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In .NET 11, the `dotnet` CLI is a native app - it's snappy, responsive, and flexible! It took a lot of work to get there, and we learned about some 'gotchas' along the way, so we want to show you our process so that you can make excellent NAOT apps too!

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ASP.NET Core and Blazor in .NET 11 deliver improvements across the web stack, driven by developer feedback and the demands of large-scale production services. In this demo-packed tour, we’ll see how .NET 11 strengthens the platform fundamentals with advances in performance, security, and observability; increases productivity across Minimal APIs, SignalR, and Blazor; and makes it easier to build distributed and agentic web applications. We’ll explore highlights including asynchronous validation, richer API contracts, more capable server-side rendering, scalable Blazor apps, deeper Aspire integration, and new building blocks for agentic user interfaces. Whether you build APIs, interactive web applications, or AI-enabled experiences, you’ll leave knowing how .NET 11 helps you build faster, more reliable, and more ambitious web applications.

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