Install .NET 11 SDK Preview on macOS Side-by-Side with Homebrew

Microsoft recently released .NET 11 Preview 1.

If you want to try it without removing your existing installed .NET SDKs on macOS, you can install it side-by-side using the Homebrew package manager.

First, tap the Homebrew repository I maintain:

brew tap junian/homebrew-dotnet

Then install the .NET 11 SDK Preview:

brew install dotnet-sdk@11.0

That’s it. Now you can experiment with .NET 11 on your macOS machine.

Just a heads up: the .NET 11 SDK is still in preview and is expected to become stable around November 2026. It’s not suitable for production use yet, but it’s good enough for experimenting.

If something breaks — or you’re done experimenting — you can uninstall it easily:

brew uninstall dotnet-sdk@11.0

After that, you’ll continue using your stable .NET SDK versions as usual.

Is It Safe? Is It Legit?

Good question.

Never trust anything written on the internet.

The reason I created my own Homebrew tap for the .NET SDK is that the official Homebrew cask gave me issues when installing multiple .NET SDK versions on the same Mac.

Manually installing different SDK versions is also tedious, especially when you need to remove or switch between them.

So I created this Homebrew tap to make it easier for developers to install multiple .NET SDK versions side-by-side on macOS.

You can check the source code on GitHub.

All download links point directly to official Microsoft-owned domains, which is builds.dotnet.microsoft.com.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for this post.

Have fun experimenting with .NET 11 on your macOS!

As usual, if you have any questions or a better method, leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

References

• .NET 11 Preview 1 is now available! - .NET Blog
• junian/homebrew-dotnet: Install .NET SDK side-by-side on macOS with Homebrew package manager.