We will be immersing ourselves in learning about the new .NET 5 release, particularly around #Blazor + hanging out to enjoy this special 10th anniversary which will no doubt bring a few surprises.
This is how we stay on top of the latest developments for .NET so that we can bring you the best design and forward thinking patterns in web development.
Come and say hi if you're attending!
.NET Conf is a free, three-day, virtual developer event co-organised by the .NET community and Microsoft. This year .NET 5.0 will launch at .NET Conf 2020!
If you would like some assistance with .NET MAUI | Azure | Azure DevOps Services | Blazor Development then please get in touch, we would be glad to help.
Conference at a glance
Day one
Day one is all about the big news, .NET 5! Join the .NET team on all the new things you can do with the latest release.
Day two
Day two is where we dive deeper into all the things you can do with .NET and our 24 hour broadcast begins.
Day three
Day three continues our all day and night broadcast with speakers around the world in their own time zones.
Making the most of a virtual conference
Attending as a team, we have learned that a free virtual conference only pays off with a little structure. Our approach is simple. Before the event we divide the schedule between us, so every session that touches our work has a pair of eyes on it, and nobody burns three days trying to watch everything. During the sessions we code along where we can, spinning up throwaway projects to try features the moment they are announced, because ten minutes of hands-on beats an hour of slides for retention.
Afterwards comes the part most teams skip: we run a short internal show-and-tell where each of us demonstrates the one or two things most relevant to current projects. That discussion is where announcements turn into decisions. Some features go straight into internal tools to be exercised in anger, some are earmarked for upcoming client work, and some we deliberately park until the tooling matures. It is also where we form the advice we give to clients, particularly those weighing up a move from .NET Framework, where each release changes the shape of the migration path and the case for making the jump.
The result is that conference week feeds directly into our .NET development practice rather than evaporating into good intentions. If your team is planning how to evaluate a new release against your own roadmap, it is a routine we would happily share in more detail.
What we're most looking forward to
.NET 5 is a milestone release for us, because it is the first big step in unifying the .NET platform. The ".NET Core vs .NET Framework" question that has complicated project planning for the last few years starts to fall away: one runtime, one base class library, one direction of travel. For customers still weighing up a migration from .NET Framework, this release makes the destination much clearer.
Beyond the headline, these are the sessions and features we will be watching closely:
- Blazor improvements — CSS isolation for components, lazy loading of assemblies in Blazor WebAssembly, the new
Virtualizecomponent for long lists, and a healthy round of performance work. Blazor is central to how we build web front ends, so every one of these lands directly in our day-to-day work. - C# 9 — records and init-only setters promise much cleaner immutable models, and top-level statements strip the ceremony out of small programs and samples.
- Performance — the runtime and libraries teams have published impressive numbers for this release, from JSON serialisation to regular expressions, and faster for free is our favourite kind of improvement.
- Single-file publishing and smaller containers — simpler deployment stories for the services we host in Azure.
As ever with a .NET Conf launch release, our approach is to try it immediately on internal projects and side tools, and hold fire on customer production workloads until we have confidence in the tooling and libraries we depend on. .NET 5 is a "Current" release rather than long-term support, so for conservative production estates the supported path may well be to stay on .NET Core 3.1 LTS a little longer — but the learning starts now.
Looking back from 2026
This post was written in the run-up to .NET Conf 2020, and with a few years' hindsight the excitement was justified. .NET 5 did exactly what it set out to do: it started the unification of the platform, and every release since has built on that foundation on a steady annual cadence each November. .NET 5 itself is long out of support (it reached end of life in May 2022) — today .NET 10 is the current long-term support release, and it is where we recommend new work starts.
The Blazor story we were following so keenly has arguably been the biggest payoff. What began as promising WebAssembly improvements in .NET 5 grew into unified full-stack Blazor in .NET 8 — static server-side rendering, streaming rendering and per-component interactivity — and has matured further through .NET 9 and 10. It is now our default choice for web UI, and you can read more about how we use it on our full-stack Blazor development page.
And the tradition this post celebrates carries on: .NET Conf remains a free, virtual, community-and-Microsoft event every November, and it is still where each new version of .NET launches. We still attend, we still learn, and we still say hi. If you want help putting the current release to work, our custom software development team would be glad to talk.
At Assemblysoft we specialise in Custom Software Development tailored to your requirements. We can onboard and add value to your business rapidly. We are an experienced Full-stack development team able to provide specific technical expertise or manage your project requirements end to end. We specialise in the Microsoft cloud and .NET Solutions and Services. Our developers are Microsoft Certified. We have real-world experience developing .NET applications and Azure Services for a large array of business domains. If you would like some assistance with Azure | Azure DevOps Services | Blazor Development | .NET MAUI Development or in need of custom software development, from an experienced development team in the United Kingdom, then please get in touch, we would love to add immediate value to your business.
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