C# Dev Kit 11 to Arrive with .NET 11

Microsoft will launch .NET 11 at its annual .NET Conf this coming weekend, and there’s a major C# Dev Kit update, too: Microsoft says it will upgrade C# Dev Kit from version 3.3 to 11, aligning it with .NET for the first time. And it will deliver major improvements.

“As part of .NET 11, C# Dev Kit has been completely rearchitected to deliver huge improvements to performance and memory usage, [and] some great new features,” Microsoft principal software engineer Drew Noakes writes. “We are aligning the C# Dev Kit’s version with the current release of .NET. The new extension version is 11.0, and the previous was 3.3.”

Microsoft first launched the C# Dev Kit almost exactly three years ago as an extension for Visual Studio Code for C# developers on Windows, Mac, and Linux who prefer the editor-first VS Code experience. With version 11, C# Dev Kit will provide massive load time performance improvements–22x to 180x depending on the workload–faster build times of 17x to 19x, and reduced memory usage of 81 to 85 percent.

It also offers a new editing experience for .csproj, .props, and .targets files that includes completions, diagnostics, go to definition, quick fixes, and semantic highlighting, similar to the extension’s support for the C# language. And there’s a new C# Doctor experience to help you figure out any missing SDKs, runtimes, and target frameworks, and troubleshoot other issues. (I assume this is similar to Flutter Doctor when you install that UI framework.)

“The architectural changes we’ve made in C# Dev Kit 11.0 set the extension up for the years ahead,” Noakes adds. “These are improvements to the fundamental aspects of the tooling, which are helpful to both human developers and the agents they’re waiting for.”

C# Dev Kit 11 is available now in pre-release if you want to get started early. And the stable version should ship soon, and hopefully alongside .NET 11 itself.