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For a new .NET cross-platform desktop and mobile app in 2026, pick Avalonia when you need a single rendered control set across all targets, Uno when you must reach the browser too, and MAUI only when you actually need native iOS and Android plus first-party Microsoft support.

Pick the isolated worker model for every new Azure Functions app on .NET 11 in 2026, and migrate any remaining in-process apps before the November 10 retirement deadline.

For any new Blazor app on .NET 11, scaffold a Blazor Web App (the template formerly nicknamed Blazor United) and pick render modes per page. Server-only and WebAssembly-only templates only still make sense in narrow cases.

EF Core 11 Preview 4 drops the long-standing shadow-property restriction on SQL Server temporal tables. PeriodStart and PeriodEnd can now be regular CLR properties, configured with strongly-typed HasPeriodStart and HasPeriodEnd lambdas.

Aider is git-first by default. To edit files outside the repo, pass them on the command line, use /read for reference docs, drop --no-git for unversioned dirs, or symlink. Five working patterns with exact flags.

Dart 3.12 lets constructors initialize private fields directly with named parameters, killing one of the language's most persistent boilerplate patterns.

Five MCP servers can burn 55k tokens and wreck tool-selection accuracy before Claude does any work. How to fix it in Claude Code 2.1.x with ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH and alwaysLoad, on the raw API with the tool search tool and defer_loading, and on the MCP connector with mcp_toolset. Anchored to claude-opus-4-7, claude-sonnet-4-6, and the 20251119 tool search variants.

List<T> is a growable heap collection; Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T> are stack-only views over memory you already own. Use List<T> for anything you store, return from async, or grow; Span<T> for a mutable allocation-free view in a synchronous method; ReadOnlySpan<T> for read-only parsing over strings, u8 literals, and slices.

Use Parallel.ForEach for CPU-bound work over in-memory data, Parallel.ForEachAsync for async I/O over many items with a concurrency cap, and Task.WhenAll for a small fixed fan-out where you want every operation in flight and need the results back.

Use string interpolation for one-shot composition of a fixed set of values; use StringBuilder when you append in a loop or across an unknown number of pieces. The dividing line is the loop, not the number of values.