First release candidate of .NET 6 now available

If you're tracking the upcoming .NET 6 release, the first release candidate signals that things are nearing completion.

Microsoft announced .NET 6 Release Candidate 1, which is the first "go-live" RC and supported for production use.

At this stage, the focus has shifted away from new features and toward quality. The team has been "focused exclusively on quality improvements" and fixing performance issues or regressions.

A few practical notes from this release:

• The runtime is effectively feature-complete. RC builds are about stabilization, so what you see now is close to what will ship later in the year.
• RC1 is supported in production. If you have non-critical workloads or test environments, this is a good point to start validating upgrades.
• Tooling is catching up. Support is aligned with Visual Studio 2022 previews, including features like Hot Reload and updated web tooling.
• Performance work continues across the stack. The broader .NET 6 effort includes hundreds of changes in the runtime, libraries, and ASP.NET Core, adding up to measurable gains in throughput and reduced allocations.

One theme in this release cycle is that improvements are incremental but widespread. Rather than one headline feature, the gains come from many small fixes in JIT, GC, networking, and core libraries. This continues the work made in .NET 5 (and of course previous versions, too).

Also worth noting is that some larger pieces like .NET MAUI were not finalized for the initial release and are expected to follow later, which keeps the main release focused on stability.

If you're planning to move from .NET 5 or earlier, RC1 is a good checkpoint to verify builds, run performance tests, and catch any breaking changes ahead of the final release.