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What's new in Windows Forms for .NET 11 Preview 5

This article provides a high-level overview of what's new with Windows Forms (WinForms) in .NET 11 Preview 5. For detailed information, see Release announcements. Use the release announcements to get an overview of the entire .NET 11 release. The rest of this article highlights the most important changes to Windows Forms.

.NET 11 Preview 5 was released in June 2026.

Release announcements

Each release announcement provides detailed information about Windows Forms changes for .NET 11:

Clipboard

  • Clipboard.GetText with TextDataFormat.Rtf now correctly reads RTF clipboard data that doesn't include a null terminator. This fix resolves an issue where valid RTF content copied from applications such as PowerPoint returned an empty string.

  • GetDataObject() returns an IDataObject that can contain bitmap data placed on the clipboard, and GetImage() retrieves the bitmap image from that data object. GetImage() also retrieves the image directly from the clipboard. GetImage() now retrieves images through the typed clipboard pipeline by calling TryGetData<Image>(DataFormats.Bitmap, autoConvert: true, ...) and returns null when it can't retrieve an image.

    The following code now round-trips bitmap images when bitmap is an existing Bitmap and you retrieve the image through the returned data object:

    // Round-trips again on .NET 11
Clipboard.SetImage(bitmap);
Image? image = Clipboard.GetDataObject()?.GetImage();

ToolStrip

  • ToolStrip controls with TabStop=true no longer incorrectly activate menu handling after tab navigation. Previously, this behavior prevented controls such as TreeView from receiving arrow key input.

  • ToolStripDropDownMenu scrolling now correctly handles menu boundaries without out-of-range scrolling or unintentionally dismissing the dropdown.

  • ToolStrip DPI changes now preserve the previous device DPI during the DPI change path, allowing scaling logic to run correctly when moving controls between displays with different DPI settings.

Layout

  • AnchorLayoutV2 now properly initializes missing anchor metadata when anchored controls are replaced during a suspended layout pass, preventing layout inconsistencies.

Designer

  • Hosted Windows Forms designers can now paste controls through CommandSet.OnMenuPaste again, restoring paste functionality that was previously broken.

  • Collection editor captions for custom controls now display the underlying control type instead of the generated ControlProxy<T> wrapper name, providing clearer identification in the designer.

PropertyGrid

Dark mode

  • ProgressBar now has default foreground and background colors for dark mode rendering, improving visual consistency in Fluent-themed applications.
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