Microsoft Releases .NET 11 Preview 1

The first .NET 11 preview release adds enhancements across the .NET Runtime, SDK, libraries, C#, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more.

“Today, we are excited to announce the first preview release of .NET 11!” the .NET team writes in the announcement. “We just shipped our first preview release, adding to some major enhancements.”

.NET 11 will be a Standard Term Support (STS) release, so it will be supported for two years after it arrives in stable form this November. As for Preview 1, there are indeed updates across the stack, but it’s not clear that any of this is major. A few I will call out include:

.NET runtime. The .NET runtime gains a new runtime-level async mechanism (including configuration, diagnostics, and AOT support), CoreCLR support in the WebAssembly SDK with new browser-host features (threading/timers/interop), more Interpreter coverage with better integration (async/ReJIT/debugging), and various performance improvements.

.NET SDK. The .NET SDK is getting CLI command improvements, several new .NET code analyzers, and several other changes.

C#. Microsoft’s core programming language picks up two new features, collection expression arguments and extended layout support.

F#. Microsoft’s functional programming language enables parallel compilation by default (it is in preview in .NET 10), faster compilation of computation expression-heavy code, and a few minor new language features.

.NET MAUI. Microsoft’s cross-platform framework now defaults to XAML source generation for “faster build times, debug performance, and release runtime performance.” CoreCLR is now the default runtime on Android. And there are a few improvements to the .NET CLI interfaces for .NET MAUI.

WPF. The Windows Presentation Foundation gets fixes for Fluent window backdrop and background in Windows 10.

.NET 11 Preview 1 is available for download from the .NET website. Microsoft recommends using this with the latest Visual Studio Insiders builds or Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit extension.