Eight categories. Eight winners. Zero vendor input. Independent recognition for the tools, libraries, books, articles, and people that made the year of .NET worth writing about.
Each year the editorial team at Dot Net Masters compiles a shortlist of the projects, products, and people that made a measurable difference to working .NET engineers. We weigh reader feedback, our own production use, and the genuinely loud arguments on conference Discords. Winners are chosen by the editors; nominee shortlists draw from reader nominations submitted via the Contact form throughout the year. No vendor paid for placement, position, or any softening of language. Disagree? Tell us why.
The single tool that earned its keep on every machine in 2026.
still the daily driver for serious .NET work — and 2026 was its sharpest release year yet.
The library most likely to quietly become a hard dependency in your solution.
love it or argue about it — MediatR keeps shaping how .NET teams write request/response code.
The environment where the most great code was written this year.
a refined, AI-assisted Visual Studio finally feels like the dream Microsoft has been pitching for a decade.
The book most often photographed on a tidy desk this year.
Andrew Troelsen and Phil Japikse still know how to write a reference you actually read end to end.
A piece of writing that changed how at least one team builds software.
a candid retrospective on three rebuilds and what we finally got right.
The technology you thought was dead, until it shipped your year-end release.
WinForms refuses to die — and increasingly, that is a feature, not a bug.
The walkthrough you sent to a teammate at 6:14 p.m. on a Friday.
an honest, runnable tour of the most powerful and least-explained C# feature.
Voted by readers — the most-loved person, project, or moment in the .NET community this year.
the unpaid stewards keeping half of NuGet running. We see you.
Tell us about a tool, library, book, article, or person that's making your .NET work measurably better right now. We collect nominations year-round through the contact form.