It has been an absolutely outstanding year of content for .NET from creators around the globe sharing their passion for .NET and the .NET team giving insight into the latest and greatest in the world of .NET. From events, live streams, and plenty of on-demand content dropping on the .NET YouTube nearly every single day, it is a great way to stay up to date, but also get involved and give feedback to the team in real-time.

This year, developers tuned into the .NET YouTube more than ever before with over 8 million views of content, left over 6,000 comments, smashed the like button over 120,000 times, and over 50,000 new subscribers joined the channel. There is now more variety of content than ever and that has led to over 700K hours of watch time this year alone! This is over 29,000 days watched or to go even a step further… nearly 80 years!

Top .NET videos of 2024

It was fun looking back at this year’s top videos as it really was a wide range of content. The most watched video on the channel was Scott Hanselman and David Fowler’s What is C#? video in the C# for Beginner’s series.

However, if we take a look at just new videos released in 2024 then Scott shows up yet again, but this time with Stephen Toub in the first entry in Deep .NET on async/await. That was closely followed up with Dan Roth and Safia Abdalla’s What is ASP.NET Core? that went directly into the new front-end and back-end beginner series that launch this year.

There is so much more to recap though as there were over 260 new videos released on the .NET YouTube this year! Let’s take a look at what else the community has been tuning into.

Deep .NET

If you are looking for deep technical content, then look no further than Scott Hanselman and Stephen Toub’s series, Deep .NET. Each episode, Scott and Stephen go in-depth on a topic which has ranged from async/await, Span, RegEx, LINQ, ArrayPool, Parallel Programming, and more. Recently they have been hosting more .NET team members including Eric Erhardt who went deep on Native AOT.

Scott and Stephen will be back in 2025 with even more Deep .NET episodes and you will hear from even more voices from the .NET team. So, if you love this type of content, be sure to reach out to Scott & Stephen or leave a comment on YouTube and tell them who and what you want to hear about on Deep .NET.

.NET Conf 2024

At this year’s .NET Conf, the 14th entry in the series, we celebrated the launch of .NET 9 and the amazing .NET community. Completely free & virtual, this year’s 3-day event featured a BONUS 4th day of exclusive YouTube premier sessions and the 3rd iteration of the .NET Conf – Student Zone! With over 90 sessions to explore, there is something for everyone. Not to mention that there is still time to link up with your local community with .NET Conf local events happening through January 2025!

.NET Conf wasn’t the only major .NET streaming event this year. In August, .NET Conf: Focus on AI highlighted the latest in AI development with .NET. We also celebrated the launch of .NET Aspire 8.1 with a full day of content at .NET Aspire Developers Day. If you are looking for more cloud content for .NET applications, the Azure Developers YouTube ran events on all things .NET on Azure and another event all about using Azure with .NET Aspire!

ASP.NET Core Beginner Series

Dan Roth and Safia Abdalla re-introduced the world to ASP.NET Core and then went deeper with full beginner series on both front-end web development and back-end API development with .NET.

For front-end web development, Dan dives deep into Blazor, Razor, components, render modes, and so much more to build a complete application from scratch.

If you are more into API development, then Safia has you covered with all things ASP.NET Core for APIs including building, testing, adding middleware, dependency injection, and so much more.

These are just a few of the new beginner series that launched this year to help developers jumpstart their development journey with .NET.

Introduction to .NET Aspire

Can you believe that it was just 7 months again that .NET Aspire officially launched, helping developers streamline their development process and build better distributed applications? So much has happened in the world of .NET Aspire including several new releases, the launch of the .NET Aspire Community Toolkit, and plenty of .NET Aspire content. One of the most watched series on the .NET YouTube was Welcome to .NET Aspire, where the team took developers through all of the different parts of .NET Aspire.

Looking to get started and want to see how to integrate .NET Aspire into your existing apps? Then Jeff Fritz has you covered with the brand new .NET Aspire beginner series, a 90 minute deep dive into all things .NET Aspire.

Top .NET Live Streams of 2024

Events and on-demand content weren’t the only thing happening on the .NET YouTube. There was a live stream taking place nearly every other day with over 150 taking place in 2024 alone! Let’s take a look at the top stream.

Let’s Learn .NET – Blazor

The Let’s Learn .NET series is a world wide live stream interactive event where you can follow along at home to learn a new .NET technology and ask questions live. Besides events, this year’s #1 most watched live stream was the Let’s Learn Blazor event walking through the latest and greatest in building full-stack web apps with .NET.

That was only the start for Let’s Learn .NET as they continued throughout the year and included .NET Aspire, Containers, and AI with Semantic Kernel. It has been really exciting to see the series grow and now be live streamed in 7 different languages for developers everywhere!

On .NET Live: Modular Monoliths with ASP.NET Core

Steve Smith is iconic when it comes to ASP.NET Core architecture videos and guidance. His session at .NET Conf every year consistently is one of the most watched and commented on. This year, the On .NET Live team had him on to talk all about making decisions between monolith and microservice based architecture.

Every week the On .NET Live team brings on amazing community members to talk about a wide range of topics, so be sure to browse the entire catalog of live streams.

.NET Community Standups

Hear and interact directly with team members building .NET here at Microsoft. That is what the .NET Community Standups are all about, they are a behind the scenes look at its development and a great way to have your voice heard and get your questions answered. In 2024, over 100K developers tuned in live and another 300K developers caught up on past community standup streams. Here are the top community standups of 2024 for each team:

• ASP.NET Core – .NET 9 Roadmap & Blazor Hybrid in .NET 9
• Languages & Runtime – C# 13 and beyond
• .NET Data – Database Concurrency
• .NET AI – Get Started with AI in .NET
• .NET MAUI – .NET MAUI and .NET Aspire

That’s a wrap!

Thanks to everyone that created, enjoyed, commented, smashed that like button in 2024! We have tons of great new content coming your way in 2025 so make sure you go and subscribe to the .NET YouTube if you haven’t yet to stay up to date. If you don’t have access to YouTube, don’t worry as all .NET videos are also available on Microsoft Learn!

What were your favorite videos and live streams of 2024? What are you looking forward to in 2025? Let us know in the comments below.