.NET 11 Enters Final Round of Testing

With just one month to go before the stable release, Microsoft has issued .NET 11 Release Candidate 2 (RC2), which I assume will be the final pre-release build of the platform.

“.NET 11 Release Candidate 2 is now available,” the .NET team announced. “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.”

.NET 11 RC2 includes improvements across the .NET libraries, .NET runtime, .NET SDK, MSBuild, NuGet, F#, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows Forms. Overall, .NET 11 is a minor release, but it will come with many small functional and quality of life improvements, including the usual performance improvements.

You can install .NET 11 from the .NET website. You can install the latest Visual Studio 2026 Insiders release on the Visual Studio website. And the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code, newly aligned to the latest .NET release, is available from the Visual Studio Marketplace.