What's new in .Net 5

Today, Microsoft announcing that the next release after .NET Core 3.0 will be .NET 5. This will be the next big release in the .NET family.
There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more.

They will introduce new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities and language features as part of .NET 5.

From the inception of the .NET Core project, they’ve added around fifty thousand .NET Framework APIs to the platform. .NET Core 3.0 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8, enabling Windows Forms, WPF and Entity Framework 6. .NET 5 builds on this work, taking .NET Core and the best of Mono to create a single platform that you can use for all your modern .NET code.

They intend to release .NET 5 in November 2020, with the first preview available in the first half of 2020. It will be supported with future updates to Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code.

Check out .NET Core is the Future of .NET to understand how .NET 5 relates to .NET Framework.

.NET 5 = .NET Core vNext

.NET 5 is the next step forward with .NET Core. The project aims to improve .NET in a few key ways:

  • Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.
  • Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono.
  • Build that product out of a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.
This new project and direction are a game-changer for .NET. With .NET 5, your code and project files will look and feel the same no matter which type of app you’re building. You’ll have access to the same runtime, API and language capabilities with each app. This includes new performance improvements that get committed to corefx, practically daily.

Everything you love about .NET Core will continue to exist:
  • Open source and community-oriented on GitHub.
  • Cross-platform implementation.
  • Support for leveraging platform-specific capabilities, such as Windows Forms and WPF on Windows and the native bindings to each native platform from Xamarin.
  • High performance.
  • Side-by-side installation.
  • Small project files (SDK-style).
  • Capable command-line interface (CLI).
  • Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code integration.

Here’s what will be new:
  • You will have more choice on runtime experiences (more on that below).
  • Java interoperability will be available on all platforms.
  • Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems.
  • CoreFX will be extended to support static compilation of .NET (ahead-of-time – AOT), smaller footprints and support for more operating systems.

They’re skipping the version 4 because it would confuse users that are familiar with the .NET Framework, which has been using the 4.x series for a long time. Additionally, Microsoft wanted to clearly communicate that .NET 5 is the future for the .NET platform.

They are also taking the opportunity to simplify naming. Microsft thought that if there is only one .NET going forward, we don’t need a clarifying term like “Core”. The shorter name is a simplification and also communicates that .NET 5 has uniform capabilities and behaviors. Feel free to continue to use the “.NET Core” name if you prefer it.

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