- 5/18/2026
- 2 minute read
Zstandard compression in .NET 11
.NET has had DeflateStream, GZipStream, ZLibStream, and BrotliStream for a while now. In .NET 11, a new one joins the party: ZstandardStream. And now we get to say "Zstd" in .NET.
Hey, I'm Steven a .NET Developer in Switzerland. I am a Microsoft MVP. Also, this blog is open source on GitHub.
Recent Posts
- 5/10/2026
- 3 minute read
BackgroundService exceptions now propagate in .NET 11
Here's a bug that lived in .NET for over four years As in: Reported over 4 years ago. If your BackgroundService threw an exception after its first await, your host would catch it, log a critical message, and then exit cleanly with exit code 0.
So everyone would think it terminated successfully. That got fixed!
- 4/26/2026
- 2 minute read
ConfigurationIgnoreAttribute in .NET 11
Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration has had ConfigurationKeyNameAttribute since .NET 6 which it lets you rename the key a property maps to. But there was never an official way to say "don't bind this property at all." That gap is finally closed in .NET 11 with ConfigurationIgnoreAttribute.
- 4/6/2026
- 12 minute read
Source code generated string enums with exhaustion support
Some time ago (over 4.5 years ago!) I wrote a blog post titled: "A better enumeration - Type safe from start to end". While cool and so - it had some issues. Let's tackle them!
- 3/16/2026
- 3 minute read
records ToString and inheritence
What is the output of that code snippet?
Console.Write(new Derived("Test"));
public abstract record Base(string Key)
{
public override string ToString() => Key;
}
public sealed record DerivedRecord(string Key) : Base(Key);
Probably "Test"?
- 3/6/2026
- 2 minute read
FullJoin in .NET 11 - potentially
We have Join. We have LeftJoin. We have RightJoin. But somehow we still don't have a proper full outer join in LINQ. That might come soon!
- 3/2/2026
- 1 minute read
Tool-Highlight: Handy
I am using a tool called Handy, which is basically nothing else than speech to text. But it does it so well that I thought, okay, let's give it some broader audience.
- 2/23/2026
- 4 minute read
Being stupid is fun: Let's create long exception messages!
Sometimes doing arbitrary stuff feels just good! So let's do that!
- 2/15/2026
- 5 minute read
New runtime async is hitting .NET 11 - Part 1
Some time back I wrote about "async2 - The .NET Runtime Async experiment concludes" basically moving the async state machine into the runtime. Now with .NET 11 we are seeing the fruits of that labor.
- 2/12/2026
- 1 minute read
Collection Expression Arguments in C# 15 are "out"
The first preview of .NET 11 and C# 15 did just release. Some weeks back I did add already an article about that: "Collection Expression Arguments in C# 15+". Well quicker than anticipated that feature is now part of it!