You're totally right on all those changes, and I think all of those things were the bane of .NET development. Getting rid of all the cruft in one swift operation was life-changing. Finally being able to junk IIS and deploy web apps to Linux running their own tight little web server (Kestrel) is fantastic.

I'm currently migrating dozens of projects to .NET 10. All of them so far were basically one line changes and a recompile.

You should be able to go from .NET 6->10 without almost any changes at all.

This is a strange take to me. I've been doing .NET for 25 years now. I don't see why you can't just write your code in "Framework 3.5" style in Visual Studio/VSCode 2026 with .NET 10? I would think almost any file from 3.5 would just drop in and compile with practically zero changes. I can't even think of any new language features that are being forced upon the developer.

I just went the other way and tore all my Dapper + SQL and repositories out of a big project and switched it all to EF Core 10. Not noticed any change in performance but dumped thousands of lines of unnecessary code. I like the tighter code, but you definitely do need to keep your eye on the "magic" of EF to avoid it doing anything goofy that isn't easily visible.

I was talking to a lawyer recently and somehow this subject came up and he confessed he has been scanning and storing all his files onto SSDs for years which he keeps in a safe to meet a 7-year retention requirement.