Developers can start using Microsoft's open source .Net Core cross-platform framework and ASP.Net Web platform in production environments, with an upgrade to be unveiled on Wednesday.
The company is delivering release candidates of .Net Core 5 and the ASP.Net 5 Web framework for Linux, Windows, and OS X. Introduced as an open source project a year ago, .Net Core is intended to scale from the data center to touch-based devices. It features the CoreCLR runtime and CoreFX libraries and is primarily driven by ASP.Net workloads, according to the project's GitHub page.
"The big new capability is that the products are adding a 'go live' license that enables customers to deploy in production, which helps us get real-world feedback on how these systems operate in production environments. The most important thing to understand is that .Net Core is now feature complete on all three OSes, including the addition of new APIs. .Net Core includes a lot more APIs, including key ones for localization and networking. ASP.Net v5 changes the hosting model so it's consistent across Mac OS, Linux, and Windows," Microsoft said in a statement. When first offering .Net Core via open source last year, Microsoft positioned it as a server-side cloud stack for development of a broad ecosystem around .Net.
ASP.Net 5 RC, also found on GitHub, includes enhancements to the runtime and tools and is intended to provide a framework for Web and cloud development. Version 5 includes ASP.Net MVC; a Web API; Web Pages, for server-side code and dynamic access to HTML pages; and the SignalR library for real-time Web applications.
Since open-sourcing .Net Core, Microsoft has offered other technologies up for open source, including CLR and its NuGet package technology. Previously, its Roslyn compiler project was made open source.