This week during Build 2021, Microsoft issued .NET 6 Preview 4 and revealed that the final .NET 6 version will ship on November 9.

“We’re now about halfway through the .NET 6 release,” Microsoft’s Richard Lander revealed. “Many features are in close-to-final form and others will come soon now that the foundational building blocks are in place for the release. Preview 4 establishes a solid base for delivering a final .NET 6 build in November, with finished features and experiences. It’s also ready for real-world testing if you haven’t yet tried .NET 6 in your environment.”

Microsoft .NET 6 will mark the completion of the software giant’s plan to unify .NET development after splitting off the open-source .NET Core from the original, proprietary .NET versions. This work began with the release of .NET 5 last year, but .NET 6 marks the culmination of this platform consolidation.

Microsoft also plans several important related releases at around the same time, including .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI), the replacement for Xamarin.Forms across Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS; Project Reunion, which makes Universal Windows Platform (UWP) technologies more broadly available to desktop developers targeting Windows; and Blazor desktop web apps.

.NET 6 Preview 4 is now available for download across Windows, macOS, and Linux. “Go live” builds of .NET 6 are expected this August, and Microsoft will issue the final version of .NET on November 9 during a virtual .NET Conf 2021 event.

You can learn more about .NET 6 and the various developer technologies that Microsoft is building with it via the Build 2021 session The future of modern application development with .NET.

Tagged with .NET, .NET 6