Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Microsoft’s open source .Net now ready for real apps

news analysis
Nov 18, 20152 mins

Microsoft is delivering feature-complete release candidates of .Net Core 5 and the ASP.Net 5 Web framework for Linux, Windows, and OS X

Developers can start using Microsoft’s open source .Net Core cross-platform framework and ASP.Net Web platform in production environments, with an upgrade to be unveiled on Wednesday.

The company is delivering release candidates of .Net Core 5 and the ASP.Net 5 Web framework for Linux, Windows, and OS X. Introduced as an open source project a year ago, .Net Core is intended to scale from the data center to touch-based devices. It features the CoreCLR runtime and CoreFX libraries and is primarily driven by ASP.Net workloads, according to the project’s GitHub page.

“The big new capability is that the products are adding a ‘go live’ license that enables customers to deploy in production, which helps us get real-world feedback on how these systems operate in production environments. The most important thing to understand is that .Net Core is now feature complete on all three OSes, including the addition of new APIs. .Net Core includes a lot more APIs, including key ones for localization and networking. ASP.Net v5 changes the hosting model so it’s consistent across Mac OS, Linux, and Windows,” Microsoft said in a statement. When first offering .Net Core via open source last year, Microsoft positioned it as a server-side cloud stack for development of a broad ecosystem around .Net.

ASP.Net 5 RC, also found on GitHub, includes enhancements to the runtime and tools and is intended to provide a framework for Web and cloud development. Version 5 includes ASP.Net MVC; a Web API; Web Pages, for server-side code and dynamic access to HTML pages; and the SignalR library for real-time Web applications.

Since open-sourcing .Net Core, Microsoft has offered other technologies up for open source, including CLR and its NuGet package technology. Previously, its Roslyn compiler project was made open source.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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