.NET 5: One Framework, All Platforms and Open Source

With the announcement of new version of .NET, we are expected to receive the new version around November 2020 and the preview available around the first half of 2020 .

There will be no .NET core in coming days, it is going to be only .NET and .NET 5 in the future of .NET .Dotnet 5 is a single platform that will work for building software of all kinds, all platforms and devices.Today there are two versions of .NET that is .NET framework and .NET core.

Now that the numbering system doesn't make a whole lot of sense why is it going from 3 to 5 .Well, they're taking the dotnet framework versioning system there so 4.9 is the most recent version of the dotnet framework and they're releasing it all as dotnet 5. So ,essentially what this means is as of dotnet 5 there is only one dotnet and that's basically dotnet core.

But after a year you will get just be a single version of .NET that is .NET 5. So, we can expect .NET 5 to be the best of .NET Framework, .Net Core, Xamarin and Mono combined in order to create a platform that you can use for all your modern .NET code with all the needed libraries, APIs, runtime and various other features. So, we will be having the best of both worlds.

So, if you are using C# 8 and .NET core then good for you, it will later be transformed into .NET 5 project with only some minimal changes.

Key Features

Now let’s see some of the key features of .NET 5 that we will get to see soon.

• Supported by Microsoft and managed by open source community.
• Single unified platform for everything
• Cross-platform
• Supports most of all platform capabilities including Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, LINQ and so on
• Scalable, fast and high performance
• Smaller deployment and packages
• Support different productive IDEs and tools like Visual Studio, VS Code, VS for Mac and Command Line Interface(CLI).

.NET Languages and Runtimes

The runtime Mono is used as a part of Xamarin to create cross platform applications. The runtime CoreCLR is used as the part of .NET Core. .NET will support both the rumtime which will work together and evolve with time.Furthermore, .NET 5 will support major compilers, languages, and runtime that are currently supported by .Net Core and .Net Framework.

Desktop Development with .NET

All the major desktop development libraries and functionalities will be supported by .NET 5. Which includes Windows Forms, WPF, UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and Xamarin.

Learn more about WinForm Here: Windows Forms

Learn more about UWP: UWP

Web Development with ASP.NET

.NET 5 will implement ASP .Net Core and Web API to build Web and cloud applications.

Learn more about ASP .NET core here: ASP .NET Core

Mobile Development with .NET

Xamarin is used to build cross platform mobile apps. Supported by Mono runtime will be used to develop apps for iOS, Android, macOS, tvOS and watchOS platforms. Xamarin provides a set of libraries, programming languages and tools.

Learn more about Xamarin: Xamarin

Cloud Development with .NET

.Net 5 comes with a major functionality of Azure application development. It also comes with Azure cloud development featuring a various frameworks and tools including ASP.Net, Web API, Azure databases,microservies , docker containers, DevOps, Serverless Computing and more.

Learn more about Cloud Development: Azure

Game Development with .NET

For Game Development .NET 5 will implement Unity as an integral part of .NET gaming to build games for Xbox, mobile and other gaming platforms.

Learn more about Unity Here: Unity

IoT and Devices Development

Windows IoT devices will be supported by .Net 5 targeting both ARM32 and ARM64 processors. UWP (Universal Windows Platform) is used for building Windows devices aps running windows 10 IoT Core. The applications will run on MinowBoard MAX, DragonBoard 410c, Raspberry Pi and more.

Learn more about IoT : IoT

Interoperability in .NET

The .NET 5 will continue to support interoperability with other languages and libraries like

• Angular, React and other JS libraries will be supported.
• Java Interoperability will be supported
• Objective C and Swift interoperability will be supported
• CoreFX will be supported and extended to provide static compilation of .NET

So, what you're going to probably see out of this is essentially .NET core will go away, you will see mono go away, you will see .NET go away, you will see Xamarin go away and in their place out of the ashes is going to be one unified .NET 5 and then going forward you will see .NET 5 developed in the open as a completely cross-platform project so what this basically means is from November of 2020 there will no longer be xamarin, there will no longer be a dotnet core, there will no longer be a dotnet framework or a common language runtime or any of these other things there will be one entity .NET 5 and that is it .NET 5 will be completely open-source and completely cross-platform and available with both JIT and a OT if it makes sense on the platform.