By Almir Vuk
Publication Date: 2026-10-21 08:15:00
Microsoft has released a public preview of dotnetup, a cross-platform toolchain manager that installs, updates, and removes .NET SDKs and runtimes inside the user’s account rather than a system-managed directory. As reported on the .NET Blog, the tool was announced on October 15 by Chet Husk, program manager for the .NET SDK, and follows the model of rustup and nvm.
According to the documentation, commands and behavior may change between preview releases, and production machines should keep using the installers, package managers, or Visual Studio.
The design, as described in the announcement, tracks intent instead of versions. A developer asks for a channel such as latest, lts, preview, daily, a major like 10, a minor like 10.0, or a feature band like 10.0.1xx, and dotnetup resolves it to a release. Exact versions, as the post notes, stay pinned during updates.
Several requirements can share one managed installation, and the tool reads the…
