📅 Daily .NET News Update — February 10, 2026

🚀 Top Story: February Patch Tuesday & NTLM Retirement Begins

Today is February 10, marking the first major Patch Tuesday of 2026. Microsoft is rolling out a significant wave of updates that officially begins the phased disablement of NTLM (New Technology LAN Manager) in favor of the more secure Kerberos protocol.

• Phase One Focus: Developers are urged to use the advanced NTLM auditing tools now available in Windows 11 24H2 and Server 2025 to identify legacy dependencies.
• Security Rollup: This update includes fixes for over 90 vulnerabilities identified in January, including a critical zero-day (CVE-2026-21509) that affected Microsoft Office and system access.
• OOB Integration: All "Out-of-Band" (OOB) patches from late January—addressing hibernation issues and remote connection bugs—are bundled into today’s release.

🔧 Visual Studio 2026 & Tooling

• Compact Mode is Live: Following community feedback regarding the "airy" Fluent Design, Visual Studio 2026 (v18.2) now includes a Compact spacing toggle for the Solution Explorer.
  • How to enable: Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Visual Experience -> Use compact spacing.
• Smarter Debugging: The Exception Helper has been upgraded to include GitHub Repository Context. It now cross-references your current repo’s history, past bugs, and PRs to suggest fixes for the specific exception you're hitting.
• VS Code Insiders (v1.110): Released this week, the Claude Agent now supports terminal output viewing, and a new "Prompt Queuing" feature allows you to submit a second prompt while the first is still processing.

💻 .NET 10 & C# 14 Update

• Stable Baseline: .NET 10.0.2 remains the current Long-Term Support (LTS) version.
• Native AOT Growth: Recent benchmarks show .NET 10 apps starting 20–30% faster than .NET 8/9 thanks to improved JIT inlining and "Physical Promotion" (moving struct members into registers instead of the stack).
• AI Building Blocks: Microsoft is pushing Microsoft.Extensions.AI (MEAI) as the unified abstraction for LLM access, replacing older primitives from Semantic Kernel. This allows developers to swap between OpenAI, Azure, and local Ollama providers with a single interface.

📢 Community & Ecosystem

• NDC London 2026: The .NET Team is currently at NDC London, showcasing the roadmap for the rest of the year, focusing on AI-powered C# apps and the future of Blazor WebAssembly (which has seen a 76% reduction in dotnet.js size in the latest builds).
• EF Core 10: Entity Framework Core 10 has introduced native Vector Search support and improved JSON handling, specifically for AI-driven semantic search workloads.

💡 Tip of the Day: Simplified WebSocketStream

In .NET 10, you no longer need complex boilerplate to manage WebSockets. Use the new WebSocketStream API for a more "Stream-like" experience that reduces allocations and simplifies high-throughput real-time code.