Announcing .NET 11 Release Candidate 2

.NET 11 Release Candidate 2 is now available. This is our second release candidate, which comes with a go-live support license so you can confidently use this release for your production applications. This release of .NET 11 is supported in the new Visual Studio 2026 Insiders release alongside Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit. Check out the full release notes below and get started today.

This release contains the following highlights and improvements.

📚 Libraries

• Read CBOR incrementally
• Experimental composite ML-KEM and HPKE APIs
• Format DataAnnotations messages with attribute-specific arguments
• Configure initial HTTP/2 concurrency
• Full Release Notes

⏱️ Runtime

• File locking on iOS and tvOS is disabled by default
• Full Release Notes

🛠️ SDK

• Quoted file-level directive values
• MSBuild properties in launch-profile arguments
• Full Release Notes

🧱 MSBuild

• Faster wildcard matching during project evaluation
• Full Release Notes

📦 NuGet

• Configure minimum package publication age from the CLI
• Full Release Notes

F#

• Runtime async support
• reraise in computation expressions
• Require named arguments for selected APIs
• Lower allocations in FSharp.Core collections
• Compiler memory usage improvements
• Bound concurrent asynchronous work
• Trimming and Native AOT improvements
• Full Release Notes

🌐 ASP.NET Core

• QuickGrid virtualization APIs are no longer experimental
• Full Release Notes

📱 .NET MAUI

• Create an app with C# UI
• Use Apple Icon Composer assets
• Evaluate the Apple Shell handler
• XAML authoring and Hot Reload
• .NET for Android
• Apple platforms (.NET for iOS, Mac Catalyst, macOS, tvOS)
• Full Release Notes

🖥️ Windows Forms

• Visual styles and appearance
• React to Windows visual and accessibility settings
• Deferred form reveal
• Visual Basic Application Framework
• Suspend painting and layout during bulk updates
• New KioskModeManager component
• New Designer-guiding analyzers
• Full Release Notes

🚀 Get started

To get started with .NET 11, install the .NET 11 SDK.

If you’re on Windows, we recommend installing the latest version of Visual Studio 2026 Insiders.

You can also use Visual Studio Code and the C# Dev Kit extension with .NET 11.

📦 Join a .NET community standup

Join us each week and engage with the developers and product managers behind .NET for community standups.

📢 .NET 11 Discussions

The team has been making release announcements alongside full release notes on the dotnet/core GitHub Discussions.

🔔 Stay up-to-date with .NET 11

You can stay up-to-date with all the features of .NET 11 with:

• What’s new in .NET 11
• What’s new in C# 15
• What’s new in ASP.NET Core
• What’s new in Entity Framework Core
• Breaking Changes in .NET 11
• .NET 11 Releases