.NET 10 Release Candidate 2 released
Microsoft has released .NET 10 Release Candidate 2, which is a big step forward in the development of this new framework. This second and final release candidate has go-live support, which means that developers can use it for production applications before it becomes available to everyone.
The main goals of the design for .NET 10 Release Candidate 2 are to improve quality and stability. Microsoft has released the software along with Visual Studio 2026 Insiders and Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit so that it can be tested and validated before its official launch.
This new version of .NET MAUI has a lot of great new features, like support for microphone permissions, better XAML source generation, compatibility with Android API 36.1, and updated Xcode bindings. The work together between Microsoft's .NET MAUI team and the Uno Platform team has been very helpful in getting .NET for Android to work with Google's newest platform updates.
Because of this partnership, developers will be able to use Android 16 and API 36.1 right away. This shows that both companies are committed to providing high-quality cross-platform experiences in the .NET ecosystem.
This release candidate also focuses a lot on Entity Framework Core, which gets many fixes for complicated JSON support, better transaction management, and better ways to run queries. There are now analyzer warnings for string concatenation in raw SQL APIs.
The SDK has also been improved so that it can use .NET MSBuild Tasks in addition to .NET Framework MSBuild, which makes it even more powerful.
It's important to note that this release candidate doesn't add any new features to a number of areas, such as Libraries, Runtime, C#, F#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET Core & Blazor, Windows Forms, WPF, and Container Images. It only focuses on improving quality to make sure that future development has a stable base.
For each area, full release notes provide detailed information about the changes and improvements made in .NET 10 Release Candidate 2. Microsoft is asking developers to download .NET 10 RC2 and help test the last bits before the framework is made widely available.
Announcing .NET 10 Release Candidate 2
.NET 10 Release Candidate 2 focuses on final quality, reliability, and stabilization across the runtime, SDK, libraries, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more.
