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InfoQ Homepage News .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2 Brings Refinements for Developers

.NET Core 2.0 Preview 2 Brings Refinements for Developers

Microsoft has announced the second preview of .NET Core 2, which is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms.  Preview 2 debuts a uniform naming scheme across all platforms for the various packages and installers.  Filenames for all runtimes will begin dotnet-runtime while SDKs will begin with dotnet-sdk.   For example, the Windows SDK filename is: dotnet-sdk-2.0.4-win10-x64.exe 

Looking at this release, the first change is a big usability enhancement for those working at the command line.  The dotnet restore command is now implicitly called as-needed when using commands like run, build, and publish—which is more developer friendly than the previous behavior of not executing and then requiring dotnet restore to be manually executed.  Also in the realm of developer usability, .NET Standard NuGet packages no longer have required dependencies if they target .NET Standard 2.0,  as the .NET Core SDK provides this base functionality.

It is possible to reference .NET Framework libraries from a project using .NET Standard.  Similarly, .NET Core apps and libraries may depend on .NET Framework libraries.  This is intended to help provide for a smooth transition for projects moving from .NET Framework to .NET Standard.  This support is for code that targets .NET Framework 4.6.1 or older.

One of the larger additions to this preview is new features for WCF support.  Notably lacking is support for message level security.  What has been added in this release is support for SOAP encoded messages, the use of custom proxy addresses for both http/https bindings on Windows, support for service operations to open or close sessions and general bug fixes and improvements.  A new extension for VS2017 users, Microsoft WCF Web Service Reference Provider, should make working with WCF easier.  This extension retrieves "metadata from a WCF service in the current solution, locally or on a network, and generates a .NET Core compatible source code file for a WCF client proxy that you can use to access the service."

Installation binaries for Core 2 Preview are available for all major platforms.  Full release notes are available on the project’s GitHub site as are this version’s known issues.  Perhaps the most important of these affects Ubuntu users—be sure to remove Preview 1 before installing Preview 2.  Visual Studio 2017 will continue to use .NET Core 1.X by default and for now the easiest way to use .NET Core 2 with Visual Studio would be to install the 15.3 preview release and the .NET Core 2 Preview SDK.  Known issues for .NET Core 2 and VS 15.3 are maintained separately.

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