What’s New in .NET 10 RC1? Post‑Quantum Crypto, Identity Metrics, and MAUI Enhancements
Microsoft’s .NET 10 has entered Release Candidate 1, introducing complete post‑quantum cryptography APIs, expanded ASP.NET Core Identity metrics, new Entity Framework 10 JSON support, dark‑mode Windows Forms, and enhanced .NET MAUI diagnostics, with the final release slated for November.
Key Highlights of .NET 10 Release Candidate 1
Microsoft’s .NET 10 development platform has entered the Release Candidate (RC) stage. RC 1 was published on September 9 and can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com. It follows seven preview releases, the first of which appeared on February 25.
Post‑quantum cryptography support is now “API‑complete” in RC 1, with algorithms such as MLDsa, MLKem, SlhDsa and CompositeMLDsa declared, and the ML‑DSA class now allows signatures to be created and verified using an external μ value.
ASP.NET Core Identity RC 1 adds built‑in metrics—including counters, histograms, and gauges—for key user‑management actions such as creating users, changing passwords, assigning roles, tracking login attempts, logins, logouts, and two‑factor authentication usage. It also brings new features and fixes for validation in Minimal API and the Blazor front‑end framework, with persistent component state support during enhanced navigation.
Microsoft notes that this .NET 10 version is supported in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders and the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code.
Earlier .NET 10 previews introduced features such as the XAML source generator (preview 7), JIT code‑generation improvements for struct parameters (preview 6), and user‑defined compound assignment operators for C# 14 (preview 5). RC 1 does not add new features for C#, F#, the SDK, Visual Basic, the runtime, or WPF, but includes:
Entity Framework 10 fully supports the new JSON data type, usable on Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025, and greatly improves complex‑type handling.
Dark mode for Windows Forms is now officially out of experimental status and works without special configuration.
.NET MAUI applications gain comprehensive diagnostics and metric tracing, focusing on layout‑performance monitoring with an extensible architecture for future observability needs.
The final .NET 10 release is expected in November.
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