By Nadia Dubois
Publication Date: 2026-10-18 07:25:00
Microsoft pushed out .NET 11 Release Candidate 2 on October 13, 2026, and two days later followed it with a smaller but arguably stickier announcement: a new command-line tool called dotnetup. Together, the two releases answer two very different questions developers have been asking for years. One is “what’s new in the next .NET,” and the other is “why do I still have to fight my operating system just to install an SDK.” Microsoft’s .NET team updated the RC2 announcement page as recently as October 17, 2026, and the company’s own documentation now points to a general availability target of November 2026 for .NET 11, keeping the platform on the same annual November cadence it has followed since .NET 5 unified the Framework and Core lineages.
