Article overview

.NET 10 RC 1 is knocking at the door, marking the first release candidate and offering the .NET community a detailed preview of what’s to come in the next LTS cycle. While not the final release, RC 1 is “go-live” supported and represents the feature-complete platform that will soon become .NET 10 LTS. In this article, I’ll try to give a rough overview of the architectural impact of .NET 10 RC 1, focusing on the latest C# 14 features, under-the-hood performance improvements, and strategic considerations for the upcoming LTS.

Let’s skip the typical release-cycle enthusiasm for a second: Most IDE updates come and go. New features, some refactoring helpers, a bit of polish, then back to business as usual. Visual Studio 2026 is different. For once, the promise of “AI-native” isn’t just marketing. If Microsoft lands even half of what they’re previewing, it’s going to matter—a lot.

In a previous article, we laid it out – unfiltered: Copilot turns junior devs into syntax secretaries.

Not because it’s evil. But because it removes friction before understanding.

It gives you working code before you know what working even means. It creates the illusion of progress, while slowly eroding the very skills that define a software engineer: reasoning, decision-making, and technical ownership.