Microsoft’s planned .NET 10 software development platform has reached the release candidate (RC) stage, with highlights including post-quantum cryptography API completion and ASP.NET Core Identity metrics.

Announced September 9 and downloadable from dotnet.microsoft.com, .NET 10 Release Candidate 1 is the first of two planned release candidates. The initial RC follows seven previews, with the first one dating back to February 25. The general release is expected in November.

With post-quantum cryptography now “API complete,” the MLDsa, MLKem, SlhDsa, and CompositeMLDsa types and associated algorithm types all have been declared for the RC 1 release. The ML-DSA class for cryptography, meanwhile, now allows signatures to be created and verified from an “external” mu (μ) value.  

ASP.NET Core Identity in RC 1 now provides built-in metrics including counters, histograms, and gauges for key user and sign-in operations. These metrics let developers monitor user management activities like creating users, changing passwords, and assigning roles. Developers can track log-in attempts, sign-ins, sign-outs, and two-factor authentication usage. RC 1 also brings new features and fixes to validation in Minimal APIs and the Blazor front-end web framework. In addition, Blazor now supports handling persistent component state when doing enhanced navigations. State persisted during an enhanced navigation can be read by interactive components on the page.

This release of .NET 10 is supported in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders and in Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit, Microsoft said.

Earlier .NET 10 preview editions brought new capabilities such as an XAML source generator in Preview 7,  improved JIT code generation for struct arguments in Preview 6, and user-defined compound assignment operators for C# 14 in Preview 5.

RC 1 includes no new features for C#, F#, the SDK, Visual Basic, the runtime, or Windows Presentation Foundation. But other features have been added such as:

• Entity Framework 10, for object-relational mapping, fully supports the new JSON data type, available on Azure SQL Database and on SQL Server 2025. Substantially improved support for complex types also is featured for EF 10.
• For Windows Forms, dark mode is officially out of experimental status and can be used without special configuration.
• Comprehensive diagnostics and metrics tracking have been added for .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) applications, focusing on layout performance monitoring with an extensible architecture for future observability needs.