Making Sense of .NET 5

Today at the first day of Microsoft’s annual Build conference, Microsoft announced .NET 5 which will be released in November 2020. This led to some confusion in discussions with some of my colleagues and friends. What about .NET Core? Isn’t that the future? The road forward?

The answer is yes, and more so than ever.

Developers currently use the .NET full framework to build WPF and Windows Forms applications, as well as classic ASP.NET web sites. Xamarin developers use the Mono framework, a cross platform implementation of .NET. Last year, Microsoft announced that you would be able to build “legacy” (WPF and WinForms) apps and UWP apps using .NET Core, and ASP.NET Core has become the most popular way to build new web sites with ASP.NET.

Simply put, .NET 5 is a re-branding of .NET Core. Along with the previously mentioned support for UWP, WPF and WinForms, .NET Core is adding support for Xamarin, Unity, WebAssembly, and more. Given that all the major types of apps that you can build will be able to be built with .NET Core, they felt they could drop “Core” from the name and just call it .NET. If it makes you feel better, you can call it .NET Core 5. Why 5? Because the .NET full framework is currently at version 4.8, so it makes sense that they would have to use a number higher than that to avoid confusion.

You can read more about it here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/