On November 10, 2020, Microsoft officially released .NET 5.0. What is it exactly? If you’re confused, so am I, mainly because for a while we’ve been disciplined to accept the .NET #.# nomenclature to mean .NET Framework then we were getting used to the .NET Core #.# naming convention.
But things are changing again with .NET 5.0. .NET 5.0 is the beginning of Microsoft’s journey to unify everything in the .NET world which includes Framework, Core, Mono, etc. and provide cross-platform compatibility. Microsoft plans to release a new version of .NET each year in November and offer Long Term Support (LTS) for every even version.
In essence, .NET 5.0 appears to be ASP.NET Core 4.0 but Microsoft is skipping v4.0 and going with ASP.NET Core 5.0. According to Microsoft, they are skipping the 4.x version numbering to ASP.NET Core to lessen confusion and solidify that there will be only one .NET unified platform moving forward.
ASP.NET Core 5.0 has a lot of feature updates and performance improvements along with a few technologies (or I’d rather say programming paradigms) that WILL NOT be ported over – Web Forms, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow (WF). Instead, Microsoft recommends that you use their alternative counterparts – ASP.NET Core Blazor/Razor pages, gRPC, and Open-source CoreWF, respectively.
Below are some of new features and improvements:
– Updates to C#, F#, and Visual Basic
– New features of System.Text.Json
– Single file apps
– App trimming
– Performance improvements to Garbage Collection (GC), System.Text.Json, System.Text.RegularExpressions, Async ValueTask pooling, Container size optimizations, etc.
.NET 5.0 also introduces a preview for .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) which is a framework for developing user interfaces. Microsoft calls it an evolution of Xamarin.Forms and hopes to complete support for it when .NET 6.0 is released next year. So, just like Star Trek movies, look forward to every even numbered release (just kidding).
Now that you have a broad overview of what .NET 5.0 is, you can read a more comprehensive list of changes here (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-0/). And because we know a lot of developers are eager and excited to start working with .NET 5.0, we officially support it here at DiscountASP.NET.
Visit DiscountASP.NET to learn more about our .NET Core and ASP.NET Core Hosting services.