The release of .NET Core 1.0 has been announced by Microsoft’s Rich Lander. This brings to fruition the first steps of Microsoft’s plans to make .NET and its supporting technologies freely available under an open source license.
In this release, developers have improved .NET Core’s offline support so that core libraries are cached locally. If your application targeting .NET Core does not use the Internet, it will not need network access to run.
The .NET Core 1.0 release notes are available on GitHub. Along with the release of .NET Core there will be a new online web portal created by Microsoft to provide documentation and tutorials on how to use .NET. Those with Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 can install .NET Core Tools for Visual Studio to use VS2015 in conjunction with .NET Core. It should be noted that while .NET Core itself is considered version 1.0, the SDK is still labeled Preview 2. According to Lander, this is because the tools in the SDK are still being worked on, however it is not an indictment of the quality. Note that telemetry is enabled for the SDK only, although it is configurable.
.NET Core currently supports console apps—additional software is required to support additional apps:
- ASP.NET Core
- Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform
- Xamarin.Forms
Developers who want to use F# with the latest tools should note that there is currently an issue preventing the use of F# with the SDK Preview 2. Work is actively being done (based on the GitHub comments) but the issue remains unresolved as of this writing.
Beyond VS2015, all developers interested in .NET Core can download the SDK appropriate for their system. This release of NET Core now supports 8 Linux distributions, Mac OS X 10.11, and Windows Nano Server TP5 in addition to Windows 7 (or newer) and Server 2012 R2 (or newer).