At this year's Microsoft Build conference, one of the biggest announcements for developers is what's going to be the future for .NET. In this post, let's see what that is.
Before talking about what's next for .NET, let's have a quick recap of the history of .NET. The first version of .NET is .NET Framework 1.0 which was released back in February 2002. It has come a long way since then, almost for more than 17 years and today, the latest version is .NET Framework 4.8. .NET Framework is only available in Windows machines.
In November 2014, .NET Core 1.0 was released. The main idea of introducing .NET Core is going cross-platform. .NET Core has evolved rapidly since then, as of today the latest version of .NET Core is .NET Core 2.2. .NET Core 3.0 is scheduled to be released on September 2019, while the preview release, .NET Core 3.0 Preview 5 is already out there. For all this time, Microsoft was porting features of .NET Framework to .NET Core. .NET Core 3.0 embraces the desktop by adding WinForms, WPF and Entity Framework 6 making it possible to port desktop applications to .NET Core.
On the other hand, there is Mono framework, which is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework that originally targetted Linux. It is based on the open standards which has its own C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono 1.0 was released in June 2004 and as of today, the latest Mono release is 5.20.
So there are basically 3 implementations of .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono. All these frameworks has its own Base Class Libraries. So what's next.
6th of May, 2019, Microsoft has announced .NET 5, which is the next release after .NET Core 3.0. Microsoft is skipping .NET Core 4.0 version name because it can cause confusion with .NET Framework 4.x versions which have been there for a long time. And with .NET 5, there will be just one .NET going forward, so there is no need for a special term "Core". But of course, you can use the “.NET Core” name if you like it.
.NET Core 3.0 will be the core for .NET 5 and great features from Mono will be moved in (currently Mono runs on more platforms than .NET Core like Android, iOS, PlayStation etc).
.NET Framework 4.8 will be the last major version of .NET Framework. But that doesn't mean it's completely abandoned, it will get service updates and support for years to come. But after .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft will not be porting any more features from .NET Framework.
So here is what's going to be new with .NET 5.
- You will have two choices on runtime experiences.
- CoreCLR or Mono
- These two runtimes has it's own unique capabilities and you will be able to decide which runtime to use using very simple configuration
- Java interoperability will be available on all platforms.
- Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems.
- CoreFX will be extended to support static compilation of .NET (AOT), smaller footprints and support for more operating systems.
Release Schedule
.NET 5 is scheduled to be released on November 2020, with the first preview available in the first half of 2020.
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.NET Schedule |
After November 2020, Microsoft will be shipping a major version of .NET once a year, every November and every even-numbered release will have LTS (Long Term Support).
Developers Take
- New applications should be built on .NET Core.
- If you are a Web Forms developer and want to build a new application on .NET Core, Microsoft recommends Blazor.
- If you are remoting or WCF Server developer and want to build a new application on .NET Core, Microsoft recommends using either ASP.NET Core Web APIs, gRPC (provides cross-platform and cross programming language contract based RPCs) or Core WCF.
- If you are a Windows Workflow developer, Microsoft recommends Core WF.
Exciting times ahead!
Happy Coding.
Regards,
Jaliya