Microsoft Releases .NET 10 Preview 1

Microsoft has finally released the first preview of .NET 10 ahead of its final release this coming November. It’s later than usual, and the release notes make it difficult to determine if there are any major new features.

“We are excited to announce the first preview release of .NET 10,” the .NET team writes in the announcement post. “We just shipped our first preview release, adding to some major enhancements across the .NET Runtime, SDK, libraries, C#, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more.”

Notably absent from that list is WPF (the Windows Presentation Foundation) that I’m using to update .NETpad. And that’s because there are no new features for WPF. Instead, WPF receives some “quality improvements” in this release in the form of “a few minor patches and bug fixes.” Even Windows Forms received more meaningful updates in .NET 10 Preview 1, most notably new Clipboard APIs

Looking at the release notes for the .NET libraries, the .NET runtime, the .NET SDK, C#, F#, Visual Basic, .NET MAUI, ASP.NET Core, and other .NET components, I just don’t see anything of great import. Perhaps I’m missing something, I sort of hope so. But maybe the annual .NET update cadence is hitting a wall.

It’s unclear why any developer would bother to install this milestone, but you can download .NET 10 Preview 1 in SDK and runtime forms from the .NET website. Microsoft recommends using the latest Visual Studio 2022 preview release. I recommend waiting on a future milestone: Surely, something interesting will happen across the many .NET technologies at some point, perhaps tied to Build 2025 in May.