Weekly .NET Roundup: .NET 10 adoption, Blazor testing, MAUI experiments

by TechHub

This week in .NET, Microsoft kept pushing the platform in two directions at once: modernizing long-running enterprise workloads (including mainframe connectivity) while tightening the inner loop for web and client apps with better testing, faster WebAssembly, and more pragmatic API design patterns. That maps cleanly to last week's split between “ship-ready platform updates” and “what's taking shape next.” .NET 10 keeps showing up as the standardization point (from Ubuntu 26.04 baselines and container tags to real products migrating runtimes), while .NET 11 previews continue to fill in practical workflow gaps (Blazor UX and testing) before they harden into defaults.

.NET 10 adoption in real products (Host Integration Server and WebAssembly)

Following last week's focus on .NET 10 as a new baseline on Ubuntu 26.04 (plus the matching resolute container tags for cleaner Linux standardization), Host Integration Server 2028 preview shows what “adoption” looks like when a long-lived enterprise product moves its core onto .NET 10. Microsoft is modernizing IBM connectivity by pairing that runtime move with new integration surfaces and platform cleanups. The headline for many teams will be expanded REST API surfaces for DB2 and for transaction integration scenarios (CICS and IMS), which shifts common host connectivity patterns closer to the HTTP-first tooling and operational model teams already use for modern services. On the ops and security side, the preview adds Microsoft Entra ID support for identity and Azure Arc support for hybrid management, aiming to make host-connected deployments fit better into current governance and inventory practices rather than living as a separate island. Microsoft is also using the release to deprecate legacy components and remove older dependencies, and it calls out Linux support for non-SNA features as part of the .NET 10-based direction (a practical signal if you are planning mixed OS deployments but still rely on specific protocol stacks). There is even an Azure AI Foundry integration callout, framing host data and transactions as candidates for AI-assisted experiences and workflows, not just back-office plumbing. In a very different corner of the stack, Copilot Studio moved its .NET WebAssembly runtime from .NET 8 to .NET 10 and documented what that migration buys in practice: tighter defaults and measurable perf wins when you lean into ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. This also connects back to last week's Linux baseline story, where Native AOT came up as part of making deployments leaner and more predictable. The post highlights built-in asset fingerprinting (useful for long-lived caching without serving stale bits) and a new default behavior around WasmStripILAfterAOT, which reduces what ships to the client after AOT. Taken together, these updates show .NET 10 maturing as a runtime you can standardize on for both hybrid enterprise integration servers and browser-hosted apps, with improvements landing not just in APIs but in the build and deployment output that affects cold start, download size, and caching behavior.

ASP.NET Core and Blazor: testing and versioning getting more concrete

Blazor’s tooling story took a step toward more realistic UI validation with a first look at a new end-to-end (E2E) component testing library, previewed in .NET 11. Coming right after last week's .NET 11 direction-setting around Blazor validation and “move common plumbing into the framework,” this is another push toward making core app workflows (forms, lists, and now testing) less dependent on custom harnesses and one-off test infrastructure. In the Community Standup, Daniel Roth and Javier Calvarro Nelson walked through the motivation and demoed the approach against real apps, positioning it as a way to test components in scenarios closer to how users actually interact with Blazor UIs (instead of stopping at unit tests or framework-specific abstractions). The key point for teams planning upgrades is timing: it is framed as a .NET 11 preview with explicit next steps driven by community feedback, so this is a good moment to watch the API shape and align internal testing patterns before it hardens. On the API side, a practical .NET 10 minimal API tutorial showed how to add versioning with Asp.Versioning.Http, including both query-string versioning and URL-segment versioning. This pairs naturally with last week's standup on aligning API versioning with OpenAPI output in .NET 10: once you start versioning minimal APIs, the next pain point is keeping docs and client generation aligned without duplicating configuration. Beyond the mechanics, it covers how to deprecate an API version, which matters when you are trying to keep minimal APIs minimal without painting yourself into a compatibility corner. The walkthrough uses a Visual Studio 2026 .http file for testing, reinforcing a workflow where versioning behavior is easy to validate in-repo without needing a heavier client setup.

.NET MAUI: cross-language UI experiments and on-device processing demos

The latest .NET MAUI Community Standup leaned into experimentation across the UI and native boundary. In context, it feels like the “client app inner loop” thread from last week (where MauiDevFlow focused on faster build-deploy-inspect cycles and better inspection hooks) expanding into “what else can we wire into MAUI to unlock new app patterns.” David Ortinau and Gerald Versluis, joined by Nick Kovalsky, demoed scenarios that mix Rust with .NET MAUI, explored SkiaSharp in broader “everywhere” usage, and discussed a drawn-UI approach where custom rendering can offer tighter control over visuals and performance than standard widget composition. The session also touched AI/ML live processing work, pointing to app patterns where you process streams (like camera, audio, or sensor input) continuously rather than treating ML as a batch step. For MAUI teams, the takeaway is less about a single shipped feature and more about where the ecosystem is spending energy: interoperability, custom rendering pipelines, and practical ML workloads inside real client apps.

Other .NET News

Microsoft launched “Quest to Compile”, a new show focused on modern game development in the .NET ecosystem, covering core topics (gameplay programming, debugging) alongside day-to-day workflows like Git and AI-assisted development with GitHub Copilot.