Belitsoft, a software development outsourcing and IT staff augmentation firm with over 20 years of experience building Microsoft .NET applications, today released its Q1 2026 .NET Development Trends Report. It highlights 3 key changes in Microsoft technology that will affect business operations, and AI plans.

"We wrote this report to answer the question tech leaders have: what do I need to decide, and by when?" said Dmitry Baraishuk, Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft. "The choices engineering teams make in the next 6 months will determine their ability to follow regulatory rules, and use AI for the next three years.”

1. .NET 8 reaches end of official Microsoft support

Microsoft will end official support for .NET 8/9 on November 10, 2026. This creates software update problems for engineers, but it poses a much bigger risk for business leaders. Running unsupported software threatens compliance with SOC 2 audits, ISO 27001 certification, and PCI-DSS requirements.

These failures can stop sales deals, cancel cyber insurance policies, and break customer contracts.

.NET 10 is available now as a long-term supported version. Planning the move now gives teams enough time to do the work properly. Waiting until Q3 leaves less time, guaranteeing a rushed process that will cause mistakes.

Any organization using .NET applications, whether built internally or provided by others, must speak with their engineering leaders about this before the end of April.

2. Microsoft Has Chosen Its Agentic AI Platform

Microsoft has stopped developing new features for Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, their older tools for building AI into applications, and put them in maintenance mode. They will keep fixing bugs, but no new work is going into them. If you create new AI features using these tools, think twice.

The replacement is the Microsoft Agent Framework. As of late March 2026, its core parts are nearly finished and stable. .NET teams don't need to wait for the final release to start building test projects.

The framework is built for the type of AI that companies need to stay ahead today: systems with multiple AI assistants working together. They can run one after another, at the same time, hand off tasks to each other, or work as a group. It lets you save where an AI paused, show text as it types it out, and easily require a human engineer to approve actions for sensitive tasks.

Importantly, it doesn't lock you into one brand. It works with Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, AWS Bedrock, and Ollama. It also follows the new rules that let different AI tools talk to each other backward and forward: A2A, AG-UI, and MCP.

.NET shops that already started building projects on Semantic Kernel or AutoGen need to rethink their plan right away. Companies that haven't started yet should realize that the choice of which tool to use is already made for them. The best time to start testing it is right now, before the final release makes it too hard to find engineers who know how to use it.

3. The Cost-Effective Path to AI-Ready Data Infrastructure

SQL Server still dominates enterprise .NET stacks. However, PostgreSQL is growing fast and often becomes the default database choice for new .NET projects.

The pgvector tool lets PostgreSQL store and search AI data in the exact same place as your normal data. The biggest cost in AI is storing everything. Using pgvector means you don't have to pay for, set up, or run a second database just for AI.

The current/latest version of that package no longer supports EF Core 8 and requires EF Core 10 or 9.

.NET shops that only use SQL Server 2025 or Azure SQL get the VECTOR_DISTANCE() function in EF Core 10. This gives you smart search without changing platforms.

If your team is building a new app with AI search or recommendations, just use PostgreSQL and pgvector. The cost disadvantage of a dedicated vector database becomes obvious at scale, unless there is a technical reason to use it.

About the Author:

Dmitry Baraishuk is a Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft. Belitsoft is a software engineering company specializing in Microsoft .NET development, AI integration, and enterprise application modernization. The company serves clients across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise SaaS in the US, UK, and Canada. Belitsoft publishes quarterly technology trend analyses to help business and technology leaders make informed decisions about their software investment strategy.

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