.NET Conf Most Popular Sessions Tool

DotNetConf (.NET Conf) is a long-running virtual conference hosted each November with the release of a new version of .NET. Its sessions are published to YouTube each year. What have been the top sessions each year? I wrote a tool to pull the stats year by year (since 2021) to see.

Also, why do I keep giving (updated) versions of the same session, Clean Architecture, each year (like last November as covered by Jeremy Sinclair)? There are some who have found it a bit… repetitive (though I do mix it up year to year):

We’ll get there in a moment, don’t worry.

What is DotNetConf?

First, for those unfamiliar, what is this we’re talking about?

.NET Conf has been a virtual event since the beginning, and this year we’re celebrating our 15th online conference. We always strive to create a world-class, engaging, virtual experience for all our attendees no matter where they are. Over the years we’ve expanded our content and our reach. We now draw over 100 thousand live viewers and sponsor hundreds of local events around the world.

15 years! It wasn’t always “.NET” conf, but it’s been the same folks running the same kind of event for a LONG time. I’ve been happy to have been a part of it as a speaker many times over the years. Look for the next one in November - it’s generally timed to coincide with the launch of the next version of .NET.

Popular Sessions

As a virtual event, the content is streamed live over various channels, and then individual sessions (and full days of content) are published to YouTube. As is true of most streamed events, the vast majority of views happen after the sessions have been published to YouTube, and these are the stats I’m able to pull and share here. Of course, you can gather this data yourself if you like. Just go to any of the .NET Conf event playlists, like the .NET Conf 2025 YouTube playlist, and look at the view counts for each session.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to sort playlists by popularity (that I’m aware of at the time of this article’s publication), so if you’re looking for the most popular sessions, it’s a tedious affair. There are 80+ videos in the playlist. So, I wrote a quick tool to assist, which takes advantage of the relatively new dnx feature of .NET.

Using dnx ardalis

Years ago, other developers were creating CLI “business cards” using node’s npx command. I followed suit, just for fun, and created this repo for my npx ardalis card. In .NET 10, Microsoft shipped dnx which “provides a streamlined way to execute tools.” Essentially it allows for the same thing that npx did, but for .NET. So, I re-implemented my “card” there.

NOTE: You should only run code that you trust using this command. By running these commands, you’re running potentially malicious code with all of the rights of the user executing the code.

That said, here’s the source code for my dnx ardalis command (so you can trust it somewhat - but remember for any such tool, who’s to say this source is what was ultimately published?).

And here’s how to run it - the first one will prompt you to make sure you want to run this untrusted code:

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dnx ardalis card

You can pass -y to override the prompt and “just run it”:

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dnx -y ardalis card

Either way you should see something like this:

Popular .NET Conf Sessions

Back to the main point of the article…

Once I decided to figure out the most popular .NET Conf sessions, I didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. So I ruled out just screen-scraping into a spreadsheet or writing a one-off script. Those don’t tend to stand up over time in my experience and I could see I was going to want to run this again periodically in the future. I’d already extended my ardalis CLI tool with a bunch of other (possibly useful) commands, so I figured I’d include this functionality in the tool as well. The benefit to you is, you can run these commands yourself directly from your own CLI without having to fiddle with installing dependencies or getting some script working in your environment.

Here’s the command to run (run dnx -y ardalis help for a complete list of commands):

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dnx -y ardalis dotnetconf-stats 2021

The result should be something like this:

.NET Conf 2021 Most Popular Sessions

You can get help for any given command like this (using dnx you must add the -- to escape flags meant to be passed into ardalis):

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dnx -y ardalis dotnetconf-stats -- --help

For instance, I recently added support for markdown table output, which I’ll use here and below:

.NET Conf 2022 Most Popular Sessions

.NET Conf 2023 Most Popular Sessions

.NET Conf 2024 Most Popular Sessions

.NET Conf 2025 Most Popular Sessions

Why Am I Presenting on Clean Architecture

Every. Single. Year.

The answer is that it remains a very popular topic among developers. In 2021 it was the most popular session and it currently has 4 times as many views as the second-place session that year. That level of interest has waned, but the topic has still been in the top 3 sessions every year for the last 5 years.

So, probably someone is going to talk about it each year, because a lot of people keep watching these sessions. I will keep submitting a variety of topics that I’d love to share with you, but I won’t be surprised if the wonderful organizers of the event continue to bless me with a topic that has proven to be very popular year after year. It doesn’t hurt that I also have one of the most popular Clean Architecture .NET Solution Templates out there that I maintain for folks who want a quick way to get started with Clean Architecture in .NET. NimblePros also maintains the eShopOnWeb reference application (formerly part of Microsoft’s official docs but spun off to us a few years ago). It, too, demonstrates how to build applications using Clean Architecture.

But just to be clear, I also like Vertical Slice Architecture and, in most of my real world applications, I typically use some variant on my own approach to modular monoliths as a starting point.

Just for reference, here are the topics I submitted via Sessionize for .NET Conf 2025:

It wasn’t just Clean Architecture…

Who knows, maybe for 2026 every session will need to be about AI…

Why dnx

The new dnx tool in .NET 10 is a nice way to easily distribute your simple utility apps. It runs them right out of nuget.org. You could do something similar with a docker run command (which is almost certainly a more secure thing to do at least as the person running the command) but publishing to docker is slightly more friction and requires more than just .NET to be installed.

Of course, you don’t have to use dnx to run your utilities - you can also still install them directly. But if you go the dnx route then by default you’ll run the latest version available on nuget.org rather than whatever version you happen to have locally. Which is better? It depends™️…

If you want to install ardalis locally, for instance, you would just run dotnet tool install:

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dotnet tool install ardalis -g

The -g installs the tool globally rather than just in the local project/path. You can see all of your installed dotnet tools with:

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dotnet tool list -g

With ardalis installed, you can run commands more succinctly and without using dnx:

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ardalis dotnetconf-stats 2025

Conclusion

OK, let’s wrap up.

• .NET Conf is an annual virtual conference held in November each year coinciding with .NET releases
• Sessions are published to the dotnet YouTube channel in separate playlists by year
• YouTube doesn’t make it easy to sort these by popularity / view count
• .NET 10 shipped dnx which makes it easy to run CLI tools directly from NuGet
• I created dnx ardalis at first as a simple “business card” but then added additional features
• You can use the dotnetconf-stats command to see the Top 10 sessions for each .NET Conf event since 2021
• I’ll probably keep sharing info on Clean Architecture as long as it remains a very popular topic
• You can install ardalis directly if you like, using dotnet tool install ardalis -g
• Thanks for coming to my TED talk 😉

Resources

• .NET Conf Official Website
• .NET YouTube Channel Playlists
• .NET Conf 2025 YouTube Playlist
• Jeremy Sinclair’s BlueSky Post on .NET Conf 2025
• ardalis-card (npx version) - GitHub Repository
• ardalis-card-dnx (dnx version) - GitHub Repository
• dotnet tool install - Microsoft Documentation
• Clean Architecture .NET Solution Template
• eShopOnWeb .NET Reference Application
• Vertical Slice Architecture
• Modular Monoliths

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