Microsoft has released .NET 10 Release Candidate 2, the final pre-release build before general availability. As reported by the .NET team, RC 2 ships with a go-live support license, enabling production deployment while allowing developers to validate the platform ahead of its official release. The build is supported in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders and Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit.
The official release date for .NET 10 is November 11, 2025, when it will become a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, providing three years of patches and updates. Release Candidate 1 (RC1) was made available on September 9, followed by RC2 on October 14, marking the final preview stage before general availability. Microsoft stated that this release is primarily focused on validation, quality, and stability rather than feature additions.
According to the release notes, RC 2 introduces no notable new functionality in core areas such as Libraries, Runtime, C#, F#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET Core & Blazor, Windows Forms, WPF, or Container Images. Instead, the team emphasized incremental quality improvements to ensure a smooth transition to GA and compatibility across supported workloads.
The .NET MAUI workload receives several refinements in this release. Windows now supports microphone permissions via Permissions.RequestAsync<Permissions.Microphone>(), providing a unified permission model across platforms. Android gains support for SafeAreaEdges, improving layout behavior for edge-to-edge rendering and keyboard overlays.
RC 2 also includes enhancements to XAML Source Generation, offering, as reported, faster debug-time view inflation and a simplified configuration mechanism through the <MauiXamlInflator>SourceGen</MauiXamlInflator> property. Microsoft described these updates as part of ongoing work to improve performance and predictability in MAUI development.
On the Android side, RC 2 introduces API 36.1 bindings, developed in collaboration with the Uno Platform team. Projects can target net10.0-android36.1 to access the latest platform APIs, while EnablePreviewFeatures remains temporarily required. The release also continues the experimental rollout of CoreCLR for Android, allowing developers to disable Mono (UseMonoRuntime=false) and run on the new runtime. While this feature is not yet production-ready, according to Microsoft, it represents an important step toward runtime unification across platforms.
For Apple developers, Xcode 26 bindings are now available for .NET for iOS, macOS, Mac Catalyst, and tvOS, ensuring compatibility with Apple’s latest SDKs and providing consistency across .NET 9 and .NET 10 targets.
Entity Framework Core in RC 2 includes stability and reliability updates, such as improved handling of complex JSON mappings, refined migration transaction boundaries, query retry support via ExecutionStrategy, and new analyzer warnings for unsafe SQL concatenation.
Furthermore, the SDK-level enhancement in this release enables NET-based MSBuild tasks to run inside Visual Studio and msbuild.exe, bridging the long-standing gap between .NET and .NET Framework build environments. By declaring tasks with Runtime=”NET” and TaskFactory=”TaskHostFactory”, as stated, authors can reuse the same implementation across the CLI and IDE without multi-targeting.
As explained by the engineering team, this feature marks the first step in a broader modernization effort for MSBuild.
This is the first step in a longer journey to make MSBuild more flexible and capable. In future releases, we plan to add additional capabilities to MSBuild to make it easier to write and use .NET Tasks, including:
- Automatically discovering and loading .NET Tasks without needing to specify
RuntimeorTaskFactorymetadata
- Reducing the performance overhead of IPC between the MSBuild Engine and the Tasks when running out-of-process
- Supporting the
Host Objectfeature for .NET Tasks running out-of-process
Lastly, Microsoft team states that .NET 10 RC 2 is intended as a release-quality validation build, paving the way for the full release next month. Developers are encouraged to test applications with RC 2 and share feedback through the official GitHub Discussion before .NET 10 becomes generally available on November 11, 2025.
