ASP.NET Community Standup: Boosting Razor productivity

TL;DR

• 1

  Razor now gets much closer to full C# editing parity: David Wenger demoed new Roslyn-powered code actions in Razor such as generating methods, properties, fields, implementing interfaces like IDisposable, inheriting abstract classes, and fixing missing using directives.

• 2

  The Roslyn repo merge is doing real work already: Devin said moving Razor into the Roslyn repo cut duplication, improved inner-loop development, enabled access to Roslyn internals, and made some features simpler or finally practical to build.

• 3

  AI agents can use the C# LSP server to understand Razor semantically: With the .NET skills marketplace and plugin installed in GitHub Copilot CLI, agents can find definitions and rename symbols in Razor using language-server intelligence instead of brute-force grep across generated .g.cs files.

• 4

  Unused using directives and tag helpers now clean up properly in Razor: The tooling can fade out unnecessary usings, remove or sort them, and even distinguish cases where Roslyn thinks an import is unused but Razor knows it matters for components like PageTitle.

• 5

  Project Sonic is targeting cold compilation speed first: Chris Sinkevich said the team is eliminating a wasteful extra skeleton-compilation pass, which should improve command-line builds, Visual Studio startup, colorization latency, and other features that depend on understanding Razor code quickly.

• 6

  Most of the editor improvements are available now in Visual Studio Insiders: Wenger said the code action work was demoed from the current Insiders build, and Daniel Roth strongly recommended installing Insiders side-by-side with stable to try the latest Razor tooling safely.