.NET 6 Preview 4 Ships 'Ready for Real-World Testing' -- Visual Studio Magazine

Many features in the just-shipped .NET 6 Preview 4 are close to being in final form, Microsoft says, making it "ready for real world testing if you haven't yet tried .NET 6 in your environment."

That doesn't mean it's ready for production use, though, as "go live" builds for that aren't expected until August, ahead of a newly finalized Nov. 9 GA release date. At that time, Microsoft's massive effort to unify all .NET components under one umbrella offering will reach culmination. That unification effort was originally scheduled for .NET 5 but Microsoft missed that November 2020 target date because of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors.

The .NET 5 unification effort was announced in May 2019, when Microsoft's Richard Lander said, "There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more."

Later, Lander explained more with GA release of .NET 5: "As part of .NET 5.0 and 6.0, we are unifying .NET into a single product experience, while enabling you to pick just the parts of the .NET platform that you want to use. If you want to target Mobile and not WebAssembly, you don't need to download the WebAssembly tools, and vice versa. Same with ASP.NET Core and WPF. You'll also have a much easier way to acquire all the .NET tools and build and runtime packs that you need from the command line. We're enabling a package manager experience (including using existing package managers) for .NET platform components. That will be great for many scenarios. Quick construction of a development environment and CI/CD will probably be the biggest beneficiaries."

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