Large-scale changes in C# 14.x and further plans for .NET development

While development of .NET 9 is in full swing, Microsoft has lifted the curtain on further major changes to come in the .NET ecosystem. The company shared its vision for the development of a new version of the .NET platform and C# in particular, which we will discuss in this article.

What's new?

The company announced a series of major changes to the .NET ecosystem.

Over more than 20 years of platform development, we have become a huge ecosystem. A huge number of applications and services have been written in .NET, and the number of developers is growing steadily. We have come a long way from a proprietary platform to OpenSource and multiplatform. But, unfortunately, we began to receive feedback more often from our partners and developers that the platform had become too “heavy and complex”, so we made a number of decisions to update .NET
Lara Rider – Director of Commercial Product Development at Microsoft

Key changes

The company wants to make the new version of the platform and language easier and more friendly for beginners, and announced the new version with a tentative title Ĉ 1.0 (previously planned as C# 14). From the author: Ĉ reads “si with circumflex”

C# is a wonderful language with a rich history. Now the language is heavily overloaded, a huge amount of syntactic sugar and outdated structures, legacy APIs in platform libraries. The same logic can be written in different ways and may differ from project to project, which greatly confuses newbies and forces old-timers to remember various variations.
Ricardo Milagros – .NET team architect

Also, in personal correspondence with the development team, we managed to find out that the libraries are in the language Ĉ And C# will “most likely” be compatible with each other at the level of IL code; they can be used in “both directions”.

AI integration

The company said it intends to implement AI at the language and compiler levels.

New Ĉ and the new version of Roslyn out of the box will support some AI capabilities, for example, code completion depending on the context, etc. In the future, we plan to increase the presence of AI in the .NET infrastructure
Tony Rogers – developer of the Roslyn compiler

The company has not yet shown examples of the work of the new AI, but promised to do so in the near future. It is tentatively known that the AI tools will be available for free and will not collect user data. It is also known that the new tool will be enabled by default, and can be disabled through the project configuration or globally. AI will be available on all platforms where .NET is supported.

Video and audio comments for the code

The company also took steps to improve code documentation.

We have long wanted to improve code documentation, and the new version of the language is an excellent chance for us to offer our developers new functionality. We want our documentation to be more visual and functional than just text, and not limit developers' creativity and self-expression. Imagine that it will now be possible to describe code not only in text, but also using audio and video! This will be implemented using a new feature Documentation plugins (documentation plugins). Audio and video are an example of ready-made plugins from us, but with the help of the new API you can develop your own solutions. Experiment, don’t limit yourself, go for it – from drawing flowcharts and embedding a web browser to creating your own mini-apps!
Sasha Brown – Lead Designer at Microsoft

From the technical details, it is still known that the documentation plugins content will be “wired” into the assembly metadata and will be available automatically when using the assembly.

.NET Plus

The company said it will launch a .NET Plus subscription to support contributors and the .NET ecosystem. A subscription extends the current .NET capabilities and is optional.

Issues and Pull requests from users on Github with a subscription will have higher priority in consideration
Built-in antivirus analyzer in Roslyn for native and third-party builds
Improvements for people with disabilities (details not yet disclosed)
Support RTL coding mode
Disabling text advertising in output when building a project with a compiler (without a subscription, it can be shown when building in Debug mode)
NFT – every subscriber will have access to SouldBound NFT for mint on the Ethereum network. The collection will be dedicated to a new milestone in .NET development and will be released in limited quantities. It is known that NFT owners will have access to some privileges, for example, a lifetime discount on subscriptions to .NET ecosystem products; the full list of privileges is still being worked out.

Conclusion

The upcoming version of the platform and language promises to be very interesting. Many issues are now at the stage of discussion and development, some features are experimental in nature. You can view the entire list of features and leave your feedback at link. Have fun!