Microsoft Releases .NET 11

Microsoft announced the release of .NET 11 at its .NET Conf 2026 virtual conference today, with improvements across C# 15, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows development.

“This year’s release makes building modern applications faster, more productive,” the .NET team writes. “With hundreds of runtime optimizations, more responsive SDK tooling, and less overhead in everyday commands, you can spend less time waiting and more time creating. Build richer web and cross-platform applications, take advantage of new C# language features, and explore AI-powered development with improved tools and agentic capabilities.”

.NET 11 is a Standard Term Support (STS) release, so it will be supported for two years rather than the three years that Long Term Support (LTS) releases like .NET 10 get. Some of the notable updates and other changes in this release include:

• The usual (and impressive) performance improvements
• C# 15 union types and closed hierarchies
• Native Ahead Of Time (AOT) CLI host
• ASP.NET asynchronous validation, OpenAPI 3.2 support, and new capabilities for Blazor and SignalR apps
• Microsoft.Extensions.AI (MEAI) for building AI-powered agentic apps with MCP for tool integration and Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) for agents and workflows
• .NET Skills for .NET-specific coding guidance
• .NET Upgrade canvas for reviewing modernization progress
• .NET MAUI now uses CoreCLR as its default runtime, plus improved XAML iteration and native controls

You can learn more about what’s new in .NET 11 on the Microsoft Learn website. And you can download the .NET 11 SDK and runtimes from the .NET website.