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.NET
Software platform developed by Microsoft

The .NET platform (pronounced dot net) is a free and open-source, managed software framework supporting Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. Developed primarily by Microsoft through the .NET Foundation, it is released under the MIT License. New versions are released annually, with .NET 9 as the latest release in November 2024 and .NET 8 as the current long-term support version, supported until November 2026.

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History

See also: C Sharp (programming language) § History, and .NET Framework § History

In the late 1990s, Microsoft began developing a managed code runtime and programming language (C#) which it billed together as part of the ".NET platform", with the core runtime and software libraries comprising the .NET Framework.

At the heart of the .NET Platform is the .NET Framework, a high-productivity, multilanguage development and execution environment for building and running Web services with important features such as cross-language inheritance and debugging.3

Soon after the announcement of the C# language at the Professional Developers Conference in 2000 and previews of its software became available, Microsoft began a standardization effort through ECMA for what it dubbed the Common Language Infrastructure. The company continued development and support of its own implementation as proprietary, closed source software in the meantime.

On November 12, 2014, Microsoft introduced .NET Core—an open-source, cross-platform4 successor5 to .NET Framework—and released source code for the .NET Core CoreCLR implementation, source for the "entire [...] library stack" for .NET Core,6 and announced the adoption of a conventional ("bazaar"-like) open-source development model under the stewardship of the .NET Foundation. Miguel de Icaza describes .NET Core as a "redesigned version of .NET that is based on the simplified version of the class libraries",7 and Microsoft's Immo Landwerth explained that .NET Core would be "the foundation of all future .NET platforms". At the time of the announcement, the initial release of the .NET Core project had been seeded with a subset of the libraries' source code and coincided with the relicensing of Microsoft's existing .NET reference source away from the restrictions of the Ms-RSL. Landwerth acknowledged the disadvantages of the formerly selected shared license, explaining that it made codename Rotor "a non-starter" as a community-developed open source project because it did not meet the criteria of an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license.8910

.NET Core 1.0 was released on June 27, 2016,11 along with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, which enables .NET Core development.12 .NET Core 1.0.4 and .NET Core 1.1.1 were released along with .NET Core Tools 1.0 and Visual Studio 2017 on March 7, 2017.13

.NET Core 2.0 was released on August 14, 2017, along with Visual Studio 2017 15.3, ASP.NET Core 2.0, and Entity Framework Core 2.0.14 .NET Core 2.1 was released on May 30, 2018.15 NET Core 2.2 was released on December 4, 2018.16

.NET Core 3 was released on September 23, 2019.17 NET Core 3 adds support for Windows desktop application development18 and significant performance improvements throughout the base library.

In November 2020, Microsoft released .NET 5.0.19 The "Core" branding was abandoned and version 4.0 was skipped to avoid conflation with .NET Framework, of which the latest releases had all used 4.x versioning for all significant (non-bugfix) releases since 2010.

It addresses the patent concerns related to the .NET Framework .

In November 2021, Microsoft released .NET 6.0,20 in November 2022 released .NET 7.0,21 in November 2023 released .NET 8.0,22 and in November 2024 released .NET 9.0.23

VersionRelease dateReleased withLatest updateLatest update dateSupport ends2425Support Lifetime
Unsupported: .NET Core 1.0June 27, 201626Visual Studio 2015 Update 31.0.16May 14, 2019June 27, 20193 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 1.1November 16, 201627Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.01.1.13May 14, 2019June 27, 20192.5 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 2.0August 14, 201728Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.32.0.9July 10, 2018October 1, 20181.25 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 2.1May 30, 201829Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.72.1.30 (LTS)August 19, 2021August 21, 20213.25 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 2.2December 4, 201830Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.02.2.8November 19, 2019December 23, 20190.9 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 3.0September 23, 201931Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.33.0.3February 18, 2020March 3, 20200.5 years
Unsupported: .NET Core 3.1December 3, 201932Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.43.1.32 (LTS)December 13, 2022December 13, 20223 years
Unsupported: .NET 5November 10, 202033Visual Studio 2019 Version 16.85.0.17May 10, 2022May 10, 20221.5 years
Unsupported: .NET 6November 8, 202134Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.06.0.36 (LTS)November 12, 2024November 12, 20243 years
Unsupported: .NET 7November 8, 202235Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.47.0.20May 28, 2024May 14, 20241.5 years
Supported: .NET 8November 14, 202336Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.88.0.17 (LTS)February 11, 2025November 10, 20263 years
Latest version: .NET 9November 12, 202437Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.129.0.5May 13, 2025May 12, 20261.5 years
Future version: .NET 10November 2025 (projected)(will be LTS)November 2028 (projected)3 years (projected)
Future version: .NET 11November 2026 (projected)May 2028 (projected)1.5 years (projected)
Legend:UnsupportedSupportedLatest versionPreview versionFuture version

Versioning practice

.NET Core Runtime roughly uses semantic versioning, the major.minor.patch format. Major versions are incremented with "significant changes", API-breaking changes, or with the major version increase in an existing dependency. It should happen yearly. Minor versions are incremented with the addition of API features, dependencies, or with the minor version increase in an existing dependency. Patch versions are given for bug fixes, new platform support, or other changes not included above.38 As of 2019, runtime versions are backwards-compatible within the same major version number. For example, .NET Core 2.2 is able to run programs built for .NET Core 2.1. Runtime versions in the same minor version.39 This appears to have relaxed since .NET 5. A "roll-forward" behavior allows any .NET program to be run on any newer version given the correct settings.40

The SDK does not use semantic versioning. As of 2019, it supports targeting every runtime version prior to its maximum supported version.41 As of 2020, this extends down to .NET Framework runtimes as well, though downloading an additional "targeting pack" from NuGet may be necessary.4243 The major and minor versions of an SDK always matches the major and minor versions of the runtime it contains or is aligned for.44

OS and architecture support

Alpine Linux, which primarily supports and uses musl libc,45 is supported since .NET Core 2.1.46

Windows Arm64 is natively supported since .NET 5. Previously, .NET on ARM meant applications compiled for the x86 architecture and run through the ARM emulation layer.47

Linux .NET runs on Power ISA to some extent since .NET 7, officially no support is claimed by Microsoft but .NET does contain code for Power ISA compatibility for Linux systems and is able to be compiled for Power ISA systems specifically 64 bit Little Endian variant.48

Language support

.NET fully supports C# and F# (and C++/CLI as of 3.1; only enabled on Windows) and supports Visual Basic .NET (for version 15.5 in .NET Core 5.0.100-preview.4, and some old versions supported in old .NET Core).49

VB.NET compiles and runs on .NET, but as of .NET Core 3.1, the separate Visual Basic Runtime is not implemented. Microsoft initially announced that .NET Core 3 would include the Visual Basic Runtime, but after two years the timeline for such support was updated to .NET 5.5051

Architecture

Main article: Common Language Infrastructure

.NET supports the following cross-platform scenarios: ASP.NET Core web apps, command-line/console apps, libraries and Universal Windows Platform apps. Prior to .NET Core 3.0, it did not implement Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which render the standard GUI for desktop software on Windows.52 However, from .NET Core 3 on, it started implementing them along with Universal Windows Platform (UWP).53 It is also possible to write cross-platform graphical applications using .NET with the GTK# language-binding for the GTK widget toolkit.

.NET supports use of NuGet packages. Unlike .NET Framework, which is serviced using Windows Update, .NET used to rely on its package manager to receive updates.54 Since December 2020, however, .NET updates started being delivered via Windows Update as well.55

The two main components of .NET are CoreCLR and CoreFX, which are comparable to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Framework Class Library (FCL) of the .NET Framework's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) implementation.56

As an implementation of CLI's Virtual Execution System (VES), CoreCLR is a complete runtime and virtual machine for managed execution of CLI programs and includes a just-in-time compiler called RyuJIT.5758 .NET Core also contains CoreRT, the .NET Native runtime optimized to be integrated into AOT compiled native binaries.59

As an implementation of CLI's Standard Libraries,60 CoreFX shares a subset of .NET Framework APIs, however, it also comes with its own APIs that are not part of the .NET Framework.61 A variant of the .NET library is used for UWP.62

The .NET command-line interface offers an execution entry point for operating systems and provides developer services like compilation and package management.63

.NET MAUI

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI, introduced with .NET 6) is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML),64 which also supports Android, iOS and macOS.

Mascot

The official community mascot of .NET is the .NET Bot (stylized as "dotnet bot" or "dotnet-bot"). The dotnet bot served as the placeholder developer for the initial check-in of the .NET source code when it was open-sourced.65 It has since been used as the official mascot.

Notes

Further reading

  • Arif, Hammad; Qureshi, Habib (2020). Adopting .NET 5: Understand modern architectures, migration best practices, and the new features in .NET 5. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1800560567.
  • Metzgar, Dustin (2018). .NET Core in Action. Manning Publications. ISBN 978-1617294273.
  • Price, Mark J. (2021). C# 10 and .NET 6 – Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1801077361.
  • Price, Mark J. (2020). C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1800568105.
  • Price, Mark J. (2019). C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1788478120.
  • Price, Mark J. (2017). C# 7.1 and .NET Core 2.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1788398077.
  • Price, Mark J. (2017). C# 7 and .NET Core: Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1787129559.
  • Price, Mark J. (2016). C# 6 and .NET Core 1.0: Modern Cross-Platform Development. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1785285691.
  • Zimarev, Alexey (2019). Hands-On Domain-Driven Design with .NET Core. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1788834094.
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: .NET Development Foundation Wikiversity has learning resources about Introduction to .NET

References

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  58. The prefix "Ryu" is the Japanese word for "dragon" (竜, ryū), and is a reference to the book Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (commonly known as the dragon book, from an early cover design), as well as to a character from the video game Street Fighter.[48] /wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniques,_and_Tools ↩

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