Microsoft Issues .NET 10 Preview 2 with WPF Improvements

The first .NET 10 preview release was pretty lackluster, but Microsoft is making up for that with .NET 10 Preview 2, which, among other things, adds some improvements to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) I’m using for my .NETpad modernization efforts.

“We are excited to announce the second preview release of .NET 10 with enhancements across the .NET Runtime, SDK, libraries, C#, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, and more,” the .NET team writes in the announcement post.

Key updates in this release include:

C# 14. Microsoft has added support for partial events and constructors to C#. “These new partial member types join partial methods and partial properties that were added in C# 13,” it explains. “Partial members allow one part of a class to declare a member, which can then be implemented in another part of the same class, often in a different file. Partial members are often used by source generators.”

.NET SDK. The dotnet command line tool adds several new aliases for commonly -used but easily forgotten commands (like package add, package list, package remove, and reference add, list and remove). These aliases different from the verb-first forms .NET usually uses, by design.

ASP.NET Core and Blazor. Microsoft provided several updates to ASP.NET Core and Blazor in this release, including a ReconnctModal component for Blazor, changes to NavigateTo on single-page navigation, automatic metadata on OpenAPI document generation, and more.

.NET MAUI. Microsoft’s cross-platform mobile app framework also gets several updates related to text to speech, modal popovers on iOS and macOS Catalyst, SearchBar, and more.

WPF. The only thing I care about for the most part, WPF gets performance improvements, a few Fluent style updates (a new default style for Label, and an animation fix for Expander), bug fixes across text pointer, ScrollViewer, and ContextMenu, and other fixes. (A bit more info can be found on Microsoft Learn.)

Windows Forms. The oldest .NET GUI framework gets various improvements, including more work on the Clipboard code that started in Preview 1.

You can install the Preview 2 version of the .NET 10 SDK from the .NET website. Microsoft recommends using it with the latest Visual Studio 2022 Preview release or with Visual Studio Code and the C# Dev Kit extension.