The one that has now appeared as part of the virtual .NET Conf 2020. NET 5.0 is technically the successor to .NET Core 3.1. The version number 4.0 is skipped and the term “Core” in the name is dropped again. Microsoft Marketing wants to express that .NET 5.0 sees itself as the common successor of the three previously separate .NET variants .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono.

In fact, the vision “One .NET” has not yet been realized in .NET 5.0. While the .NET Framework has been since 19. April 2019 is on the sidelines, the development of Mono and the Xamarin platform based on it continues , because Microsoft is far from finished with the integration. After all, with Blazor WebAssembly, the manufacturer has meanwhile replaced the Mono class library with the .NET 5.0 class library (see Fig. 1). The runtime environment used in Blazor WebAssembly is still mono-based and uses an interpreter instead of a just-in-time compiler. The announced integration of the creation of mobile applications for iOS, Android and Windows with Xamarin (including Xamarin.Forms) should only take place in .NET 6.0.

The current status of the .NET family with .NET Framework 4.8, .NET 5.0 and Mono 6. 10 (Fig. 1) (Status: 10. November 2020)

(Image: Holger Schwichtenberg)

Types of application With .NET 5.0, developers can develop the following types of applications:

ASP.NET Core 5.0-based web applications with server-side rendering or single-page apps with client-side rendering (with Blazor) Web services (REST-based WebAPIs and Google RPC) Console applications Background services Desktop applications with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Windows from version 7 Windows Universal Apps and Desktop Applications for Windows 10 with the Windows UI Library 3 (release date planned for spring 2021) There is still no cross-platform GUI library in .NET 5.0. Software developers who want to develop a desktop application must use the Target Framework Moniker “net5.0-windows” instead of “net5.0” and are therefore limited to the Windows operating system.

The object-relational mapper Entity Framework Core and the web framework ASP.NET Core kept the “Core” in their name in .NET 5.0 to differentiate itself from its classic predecessors. However, Microsoft has introduced a new technical limitation. Entity Framework Core 5.0 (the number 4.0 was also skipped here) only runs on platforms that support .NET Standard 2.1. These are .NET 5.0, .NET Core 3.x and Mono from version 6.4. The classic .NET Framework 4.8 and its predecessors are unfortunately not included. This means that developers who have previously used Entity Framework Core 1.0 to 3.1 on the classic .NET Framework are now at a dead end. As for .NET Core 3.1, support for Entity Framework Core 3.1 is only available until December 3rd 2022.

Microsoft already had this exclusion of the classic .NET Framework for ASP.NET Core in September 2019 completed with version 3.0. Only ASP.NET Core 1.0 to 2.2 also ran on the classic .NET Framework.

betterCode () presents: .NET 5.0 – The online event on December 3rd 2020 You can learn that: From .NET Framework via .NET Core to .NET 5.0: What does this mean for the migration, and how big is the effort? What’s new in .NET 5.0? New features: Get to know ASP.NET Core 5.0 and Blazor 5.0 The most important language innovations in C # 9 Mobile development with .NET 5 OR mapping with Entity Framework Core 5.0 WinUI 3 as an alternative to WPF and UWP Outlook for .NET 6.0 Support only until February 2022 . NET 5.0, unlike .NET Core 3.1, is not an LTS version (Long-Term Support), but becomes Supported by Microsoft probably only until February 2022. That’s three months after the release of .NET 6.0, which is supposed to come in exactly one year. Developers who now rely on .NET 5.0 will have to migrate back to .NET 6.0 at the end of next year. Only .NET 6.0 will then offer three years of support again.