A Brief Overview About .NET Technologies
A Beginner guide To Start With .NET Framework, .NET Core, .NET & .NET Standard
When I started to learn .NET, the main question was that there are so many terms related to .NET. It creates lots of confusion if you are at the beginner level. We have .NET framework, .NET Core, .NET, and .NET Standards, and add to that confusion, and we also have versions of C#. How does this all fit together?
This article will provide answers to the above questions, and I hope it will also solve misconceptions.
When you hear these terms, you feel like Microsoft messed up this one. I think it is not like that. It is quite the opposite.
.NET Framework
First, let’s start with what the .NET framework is if we understand the foundation of all of this. It is easy to understand why these changes came into play and what changes are, and their importance.
Let’s go back to the year 2000. Microsoft released this .net to the world, and a lot of stuff has changed over the years, and they named this the .NET framework. People are confused like dot net means c sharp. It is not .NET is an own thing, and it is a platform you build upon. You can use various languages to build on top of the .NET framework. As languages, we have VB, C#, and F#. Basically, the .NET framework is language agnostic. And it is supported only on the Windows platform.
.NET framework is more than 20 years old, and also the world has rapidly changing as well as technologies, architectures are invented due to these dot net getting slow down in the systems.
.NET Core
Microsoft came up with .NET Core in 2016, with massive changes in architecture, compilations, and execution techniques in the .NET framework to overcome this problem and sustain it in the following decades.
The advantage of the .NET Core based .NET framework is that most of the c# codes are executed in the .NET core. Also, it has cross-platform Operating systems support.
The .NET framework has long-term support and no need to migrate projects to dot net core. But newly created projects are better to create with .NET Core.
.NET
The confusion of these .NET frameworks and .NET Core versioning and its names. They skipped .NET Core version 4, and it is onward they named as just .NET. It is no longer differentiating itself from the .NET framework, which is now moved beyond it. But I think this new naming conversion is pretty much hard to google.
.NET Standard
There is one more thing remaining, what is the .NET standard thing...
Simply it is a bridge. Each .NET framework and dot net core have abstraction layers that compile any language that could execute itself. It is like an interface that bridges the gap between these frameworks, and it means compiling into any of them as needed.
Basically, what the .NET standard is. Once written, code can be executed in multiple abstraction layers like .NET, .NET core xamrin/mono, unity, etc. It will develop eventually. It will be the next revolutionary feature that comes with .NET in the future.
ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core
Additionally, You may hear ASP.NET or ASP.NET core terms. ASP is used to tell that it is a web framework that is built upon .NET. ASP stands for active server pages.
I hope this read would assist you to have a basic idea of the .NET technologies and their evolution. thanks for reading and hope to meet you with the next article. 😁👋