Microsoft Delivers .NET 10

As promised, Microsoft today released .NET 10 after a 9 month development cycle that started with a first preview in February.

“.NET 10 is the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant release of .NET yet,” the .NET team explains. “It’s the result of another year of effort from thousands of developers around the world. This release includes thousands of performance, security, and functional improvements across the entire .NET stack-from languages and developer tools to workloads, enabling you to build with a unified platform and easily infuse your apps with AI.”

.NET is now a free, cross-platform, and open source software platform that includes a runtime, libraries and APIs for developers, and various frameworks that span the web, mobile, desktop, AI, cloud, microservices, gaming, and Internet of Things (IoT). So it’s sort of “a floor wax and a dessert topping” that powers multiple Microsoft platforms that include Copilot, Xbox, Microsoft 365, Bing, and more. And it’s used by over 7 million developers.

Microsoft ships a new .NET version each November now, using a major/minor release cadence. .NET 10 is a major release, or what’s called a long term support (LTS) release, meaning that it will be supported for three years, or until November 10, 2028.

You can download .NET 10 (in SDK, runtime, and other forms), Visual Studio 2026, which also arrives today, and the latest C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code now.

And be sure to check-in on the three-day .NET Conf 2025, which is underway now. There’s even a fun mention of me coming up in there that I’ll be writing about soon.