.NET in 2015... Is it .NET 4.6, .NET Core 5, both? Beth knows and shares... (Hint: Both)

Beth Massi - Understanding .NET 2015

Last year after BUILD I posted Exciting Times for .NET and since then I have had the pleasure of working much closer with the .NET team, which includes the runtime, framework, languages & compilers. Although my focus has been a lot more on internal community in the last year, such as helping run internal conferences for our field employees, I’ve also spent time helping get the .NET Foundation off the ground and learning a lot about open source communities and all our .NET Foundation projects. Oh right, I also got married. :-) It’s been a transition period for me. Going from community “evangelist” to more of a “facilitator” or “connector”.  I really like Alex Hillman’s term: Tummler.

Now that we’re approaching the next BUILD, I’m even more excited about the progress we’ve been making, particularly around the .NET platform itself, and the team’s approach to open source. There are multiple tracks of .NET innovations happening so I thought I’d write a high-level “sign-post” style blog post to help people understand the major pieces and how and where to get involved with the projects. In other words, a good place to start learning about .NET 2015. At least that’s my hope!

.NET 2015 – 10,000 foot view

At a very high level, here’s the rundown of the major components that fall under the “.NET 2015” umbrella.

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Major components of .NET 2015

Frameworks and Runtimes

The .NET Framework is a managed execution environment that provides a variety of services to its running applications. It consists of two major components: the common language runtime (CLR), which is the execution engine that handles running applications; and the .NET Framework Class Library, which provides a library of tested, reusable code that developers can call from their own applications.

.NET Framework 4.6 builds upon 4.5.2 and contains new APIs, improvements to event tracing, and many bug fixes. This is the next version of the full .NET Framework we know today. .NET Framework 4.6 will be included in Windows 10 and will also ship on Windows Update for previous OSes (Vista and above). See: .NET Framework 2015 Preview

.NET Core 5 is a general purpose, modular framework that can be used across a wide variety of app models and platforms, is available as open source, can be deployed modularly & locally (side-by-side), and will be supported by Microsoft on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. It is a refactored set of base class libraries (corefx) and runtime (coreclr) which includes a new JIT compiler (“RyuJIT”), the .NET Garbage Collector, native interop and many other .NET runtime components. Today, .NET Core builds and runs on Windows. We are adding Linux and Mac implementations of platform-specific components over the next few months.

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I know YOU all know and understand what .NET 4.6, .NET 5 (Core), etc. etc. are, but I bet some (many/most) of your co-workers don't. Beth does a great job in detailing both, what's in what and what's not, what's open source (now and in the future) and what's not... In short, read her article. AND keep if for reference, as it IS a little confusing right now (and for a few years into the future, I'll bet...)