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.NET 10 RC2 Is Final Step Before GA, with Help from Uno Platform
Microsoft announced the availability of .NET 10 Release Candidate 2 (RC2), the final prerelease version before general availability. As with RC1, the release is production-ready with a go-live support license and is focused on quality and stabilization across all supported platforms.
RC2 is available now through the .NET Blog and supported in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders and Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit. .NET 10 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release and will be supported on multiple operating systems for 36 months.
According to Microsoft, RC2 includes no major new features but delivers quality improvements across the SDK, libraries, and runtime. The update is designed to let developers confidently begin deploying .NET 10 workloads ahead of next month's general availability. The announcement also encourages developer feedback via GitHub Discussions to validate the final release.
.NET MAUI and Uno Platform Collaboration
One of the key highlights in RC2 is the continued refinement of .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI), including microphone permission improvements, SafeAreaEdges, XAML Source Generation updates, and Android API 36.1 support. .NET MAUI evolved from Xamarin.Forms, Microsoft's earlier cross-platform UI framework for mobile apps. Microsoft specifically credited Uno Platform for its collaboration with the .NET MAUI team on Android work.
"We're grateful to the Uno Platform team for their deep collaboration with the .NET MAUI team in preparation for .NET 10 RC2," Microsoft said. "Their contributions helped ensure .NET for Android is aligned with Google's latest platform updates, enabling developers to take advantage of Android 16 and API 36.1 right away. This kind of partnership strengthens the .NET ecosystem and reflects our shared commitment to delivering high-quality, cross-platform developer experiences."
The Uno Platform team confirmed the partnership in a companion announcement, detailing joint engineering work that enabled Android 16 support in .NET 10 RC2. The update required binding infrastructure and tooling changes to support new SDK versioning schemes. Uno said the work "took nearly one and a half months of tight collaboration between senior Uno Platform and .NET engineers" to update interop, API alignment, and runtime behavior.
Uno Platform also said it plans to contribute to the .NET runtime repositories to help enable WebAssembly multithreading, one of the most requested features in its ecosystem. Future collaboration will extend to .NET for iOS and to co-maintaining SkiaSharp, which Uno described as "the graphics engine that powers Uno Platform's rendering across mobile, web, desktop and embedded." CEO François Tanguay said: ".NET has been the backbone of Uno Platform from the start, and this partnership is about giving back in a meaningful way."
Next Steps Toward .NET 10 GA
.NET 10 RC2 completes Microsoft's release candidate cycle ahead of next month's general availability milestone. The company has for years released major .NET updates at .NET Conf, which is set to kick off Nov. 11 this year. The update will be supported in Visual Studio 2026 and Visual Studio Code. Developers can download installers and binaries now from the official .NET 10 GitHub repository and participate in community feedback discussions to finalize the release.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.