INTRODUCTION

.NET Core is a modern, cross-platform, and open-source development platform developed and maintained by Microsoft. It provides developers with a fast, flexible, and modular framework for building applications for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the characteristics of .NET Core, its platform components, and some of its new innovations.

CHARACTERISTICS OF .NET CORE

Here are some of the major characteristics of .NET Core:

1. Open Source: .NET Core is an open-source framework, licensed under MIT and Apache 2 licenses. It is a .NET Foundation project and is available on GitHub, promoting a more transparent development process and an active and engaged community.
2. Cross-Platform: Applications developed using .NET Core can be run and its code can be reused across different platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
3. Flexible Deployment: .NET Core supports two types of deployment: framework-dependent and self-contained. With framework-dependent deployment, your app depends on a system-wide version of .NET Core. With self-contained deployment, the .NET Core version used to build your application is also deployed along with your app and third-party dependencies. Read More..
4. Command-Line Tools: All product scenarios can be exercised at the command-line.
5. Compatible: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library.
6. Modular: .NET Core is released through NuGet in smaller assembly packages, enabling developers to optimize their app by including just those NuGet packages which they need in their app.

THE .NET CORE PLATFORM

The .NET Core Platform contains the following main parts:

1. .NET Runtime: It provides a type system, assembly loading, a garbage collector, native interop, and other basic services.
2. Fundamental Libraries: A set of framework libraries, which provide primitive data types, app composition types, and fundamental utilities.
3. SDK & Compiler: A set of SDK tools and language compilers that enable the base developer experience, available in the .NET Core SDK.
4. ‘dotnet’ App Host: It is used to launch .NET Core apps. It selects the runtime and hosts the runtime, provides an assembly loading policy, and launches the app. The same host is also used to launch SDK tools in much the same way.

Revision Notes:

Cross-platform support: .NET Core allows developers to create applications that run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Open-source: .NET Core is open-source, which means its source code is freely available for anyone to view, modify, or distribute.

Command-line tools: Developers can use command-line tools to create and manage .NET Core applications.

High-performance: .NET Core is designed for high performance and can handle large workloads efficiently.

Cloud-ready: .NET Core works well in cloud environments, and can easily be deployed to platforms such as Azure.

Easy to deploy: .NET Core applications can be deployed as self-contained executables or framework-dependent executables, making them easy to deploy and run on various systems.

Containerization support: .NET Core works well with containerization technologies such as Docker, allowing developers to easily package and deploy their applications in a container.

Compatibility with .NET Framework: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, which allows developers to migrate their existing .NET Framework applications to .NET Core.

Community-driven: .NET Core has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and provide support for other developers.