.NET 11 RC2 Adds Post-Quantum Crypto, .NET MAUI C# UI and NuGet Controls

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.NET 11 RC2 Adds Post-Quantum Crypto, .NET MAUI C# UI and NuGet Controls

Microsoft has released .NET 11 Release Candidate 2 (RC2), adding new cryptography APIs, mobile and desktop development features, and improvements to NuGet, MSBuild and ASP.NET Core as the platform heads toward general availability in November.

The Oct. 13 announcement covers a broad range of updates, including experimental post-quantum cryptography capabilities, new options for building .NET MAUI interfaces in C#, and package management controls designed to restrict how soon newly published packages can be used.

Like RC1, released in September, the second release candidate comes with a go-live support license, meaning developers can deploy production applications using the prerelease version. Microsoft supports development with Visual Studio 2026 Insiders or Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit extension.

New Cryptography and Library Features
Among the additions are experimental APIs for composite Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) and Hybrid Public Key Encryption (HPKE), along with support for processing CBOR data incrementally.

According to Microsoft's library release notes, the new CompositeMLKem API combines classical and post-quantum key-encapsulation algorithms so that both contribute to a shared secret. Support depends on the underlying platform and the selected algorithm combination.