In 2024, the .NET blog continued to be a central hub of knowledge, delivering valuable insights and updates straight from the source. With over 130 posts and more than 260,000 words published, these blogs remain a critical resource for developers looking to stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in .NET. Alright, let’s explore the top blogs from the .NET team that made the biggest impact this year.

Announcing .NET 9

.NET 9 is here! It is the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant release of .NET yet! We started the year by sharing our vision for .NET 9 and our strategy for engaging deeper with the developer community around the release. This meant that we pivoted our content on the blog to focus on .NET 8, the current shipping version of .NET at the time. This led to a new form of extremely detailed release notes on GitHub for every preview release. In addition, we focused on ensuring that as .NET 9 progressed every feature was documented and maintained on Microsoft Learn. The means on launch day that developers could not only read the announcement on .NET 9, but they could also dive deep into documentation around all part of what’s new in .NET 9 including the Runtime, Libraries, SDK, C# 13, F# 9, ASP.NET Core, .NET Aspire, .NET MAUI, EF Core, WPF, and Windows Forms.

Want to go deeper on all things .NET 9? Be sure to browse all of the blog entries this year covering .NET 9 updates, videos from .NET Conf, and of course the .NET Conf 2024 Keynote where you can watch me walk across the beautiful new bridge on the Microsoft campus for 5 minute straight!

Performance Improvements in .NET 9

It wouldn’t be a new release with Stephen Toub’s complete deep dive into the vast performance improvements in .NET. When printed to PDF the blog spans over 320 pages covering the over 1,000 performance related pull-requests in .NET 9. From enhancements to garbage collection, Native AOT, threading, reflection, LINQ, loops, JIT, and so much more it is an absolute must read.

If you want to spend your holiday break enjoying the entire history of performance improvements in Toub’s ongoing series, then check out previous posts on .NET 8, .NET 7, .NET 6, .NET 5, .NET Core 3.0, .NET Core 2.1, and .NET Core 2.0.

If you are like me and would rather watch a video on all these improvements, then Toub has you covered again with his session from .NET Conf 2024!

Introducing ASP.NET Core metrics and Grafana dashboards in .NET

.NET Aspire includes a fantastic developer dashboard for OpenTelemetry, but did you know you can easily setup your own custom Grafana dashboards? This blog post introduces new metrics in .NET for ASP.NET Core, including HTTP request counts, duration, and error handling diagnostics. It highlights the pre-built Grafana dashboards for monitoring apps in production, and how you can create custom metrics and use tools like dotnet-counters for live metrics viewing.

General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development

.NET Aspire is officially here! A new stack designed to simplify the development of .NET projects with tools, templates, and integrations to streamline building distributed applications. Key features include the .NET Aspire Dashboard for viewing OpenTelemetry data, support for various databases and cloud services, and the ability to orchestrate local development with the App Host project. Take an indepth look and how to get started with .NET Aspire using Visual Studio, the .NET CLI, or Visual Studio Code.

Also, be sure to browse through all .NET Aspire blog posts, the What’s new in .NET Aspire 9 session from .NET Conf, the brand new .NET Aspire beginner series, and free Microsoft Learn training and .NET Aspire credential.

Introducing .NET Smart Components – AI-powered UI Controls

.NET Smart Components are a set of AI-powered UI controls for .NET apps, initially available for Blazor, MVC, and Razor Pages. These components include Smart Paste, Smart TextArea, and Smart ComboBox, which enhance user productivity by automating form filling, autocompleting text, and providing intelligent suggestions. You can try these components today and checkout full sample apps and provide feedback to help improve them on GitHub.

Since the first announcements of Smart Components, an entire ecosystem has grown around the initiative. Read about the thriving smart components ecosystem from popular component vendors to easily add AI to your .NET apps.

C# 12 Blog Series

The team also experimented with some new series on the blog including “Refactor your C# code” from David Pine who explored various C# 12 features and how to integrate them into your every day coding including:

• Primary cnstructors
• Collection expressions
• Aliasying any type
• Default lambda parameters

AI + .NET Blogs

It is now easier than ever to find blogs on the latest in AI development with .NET with the AI category on the .NET blog. You can dive into great posts on big announcements, getting started, and in-depth tutorials on using the latest models. Here are some of my favorites:

• Introducing Microsoft.Extensions.AI
• Announcing the stable release of the official OpenAI library for .NET
• How we build GitHub Copilot into Visual Studio
• eShop infused with AI
• Using local AI models with .NET Aspire

Go Deep on Developer Workloads

There is so much more on the .NET blog to revist with great content across our workloads for building mobile, desktop, and web applications with .NET. Here are some of my top picks across .NET MAUI, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Entity Framework and more.

• .NET MAUI welcome Syncfusion open-source contributions
• Learn to build your first Blazor Hybrid app!
• Creating bindings for .NET MAUI with Native Library Interop
• MongoDB EF Core Provider: What’s New?
• How to use a Blazor QuickGrid with GraphQL
• The FAST and the Fluent: A Blazor Story
• OpenAPI document generation in .NET 9
• Adding .NET Aspire to your existing .NET Apps
• Build & test resilient apps in .NET with Dev Proxy

A fresh new look!

You may have noticed a fresh new look for all of the developer blogs here at Microsoft. This brand new look and feel comes with some great new features including a full table of contents, a Read Next sections, easier sharing, and improved navigation.

There you have it, the top .NET blog posts of 2024! What were your favorites? What do you want to see more of in 2025? Let us know and share your favorite .NET blogs in the comments below.

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Don’t forget to go download .NET 9 today!