Microsoft has published a second release candidate (RC) of the planned .NET 10 software development platform, featuring a new microphone permission for .NET MAUI (the multi-platform app UI) and enhancements to the Android mobile platform.

Unveiled October 15, RC 2 is slated to be the final release candidate of .NET 10, following .NET 10 RC 1, announced September 9. Developers can download .NET 10 RC 2 at dotnet.microsoft.com. The second RC comes with a go-live support license. General availability of the production release of .NET 10 is expected November 11 or shortly thereafter.

For microphone permission in .NET MAUI, the latest RC adds the Windows implementation of Permissions.RequestAsync(), used to request and check access permission for the device microphone. .NET MAUI also has improvements to XAML source generation, notably to debug time view inflation. Additionally for .NET MAUI, edge-to-edge support for unsafe areas in the device display has been added to Android via SafeAreaEdges, Microsoft said.

With the Entity Framework (EF) Core in RC 2, fixes have been made for EF complex JSON support, with Entity Framework now allowing the mapping of complex types to JSON. But for other parts of .NET, such as libraries, the runtime, C#, and F#, RC 2 adds no notable feature additions, according to Microsoft. Prior to RC 1 and RC 2, .NET 10 preview editions have featured 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. The first preview arrived February 25, emphasizing capabilities across the .NET runtime, SDK, and other areas.