Today, we are happy to deliver the first preview of .NET 6 and ''share what you can expect from the new release.

We have been defining the overall shape of the release for the last few months, including a large set of new experiences and capabilities. The heart of .NET 6 is delivering the final parts of the .NET unification plan that started with .NET 5. The release will also include major improvements across all parts of .NET, including for cloud, desktop, and mobile apps. It will take multiple previews for the larger scope of the release to be fully available in .NET 6 builds.

You can download .NET 6 Preview 1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Unified And Extended

NET 6 will enable you to build the apps that you want to build, for the platforms you want to target, and on the operating systems, you want to use for development. We’re extending what you can do with .NET and where you can do it by delivering the rest of .NET unification vision.

When you install the .NET SDK, you can start building apps for mobile platforms. That means that you’ll be able type dotnet new android and then dotnet run and expect an Android emulator to start running a .NET app. The same is true for iOS apps. You will have similar experiences in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Don’t worry that the .NET SDK is going to get a lot bigger because of mobile workloads being supported. The mobile workloads will be optional.

Open Planning

We adopted a more open planning process with .NET 6. We plan .NET releases with a hierarchical model of themes, epics, and user stories, with priorities and categories. This model enables you to see the release at a broader scope, provides insight on which features are the most important, and makes it easier to find opportunities to engage and contribute.