dotnetup Enters Public Preview to Simplify .NET Installs Across 3 Platforms

1 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Oct 29

Microsoft’s new dotnetup preview packages .NET SDKs, runtimes and platform tools into one cross-platform CLI, aiming to replace fragmented installers and admin-heavy setup.
The tool installs in user directories without elevated privileges, isolates multiple .NET versions, and lets developers pin channels, feature bands or specific SDK releases for separate workspaces.
Tests on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu were mostly smooth, but Windows pulled .NET 9 and 10 plus desktop and ASP.NET runtimes, while macOS and Linux installed only .NET 10 and macOS lacked ASP.NET support.
CI/CD is a key target: dotnetup runs non-interactively, disables first-use onboarding in pipelines, and ships sample GitHub Actions YAML for installing a chosen SDK and running builds and tests.
The preview still lacks broader runtime coverage—such as Aspire, WebAssembly and more extensions—but positions itself as a rustup-style answer to growing .NET toolchain complexity.

Sources

Is Microsoft’s new dotnetup the rustup-style fix .NET developers needed for side-by-side SDKs, or just another layer of tooling?

Can dotnetup’s user-level, pinned-version approach make .NET builds more reproducible across laptops and CI runners?

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