Microsoft Releases .NET 9 Release Candidate 2

With one month to go until the final release, Microsoft has delivered the second and final release candidate of .NET 9.

“As we prepare for the general availability (GA) release of .NET 9 in November we are adding our final touches around performance, stability, and any additional optimizations to make it the best release of .NET 9,” the .NET team writes in the announcement post. “.NET 9 Release Candidate 2 is covered by a go-live license so you can receive support when using it in your production applications. We encourage developers today to try out this latest release and give the teams feedback on anything that you find in your development so we can incorporate any additional enhancements into the final release.”

Given how late we are in the schedule, there’s not much to say about RC2: No new features are added in this release. So no, there’s no update to the horribly incomplete Windows 11 theming support that Microsoft shipped as part of .NET 9 Preview 4 way back in May. Ah, well.

You can download .NET 9 Release Candidate 2 from the .NET website. Microsoft recommends that those developing on Windows pair this with the latest Visual Studio 2022 preview. Note that you can now install .NET 9 directly from Visual Studio 2022 17.2 Preview 3 or newer as well.