Confluent's clients for Apache Kafka® have recently released version 1.0, which includes significant improvements in the .NET client. The new API introduces strongly typed configuration classes and builder classes to provide more flexibility during client creation. Additionally, serialization APIs have been designed with flexibility in mind, allowing for advanced use cases such as integration with Confluent Schema Registry. A new general-purpose Message class has also been introduced, encapsulating the contents of a message. These improvements make the Confluent .NET client one of the more polished APIs for Kafka and pave the way for similar enhancements in clients for other languages.