Last month, Microsoft made waves at Red Hat’s DevNation Summit in San Francisco, as they announced the release of .NET Core 1.0, the latest version of .NET runtime platform, which was long time expected.

The main reason for Microsoft’s improvements was the need to adapt to today’s world and embrace various platforms to face the huge competition on the market.

In the past years, Microsoft dealt with some problems related to its .NET framework. One of them was the lack of its shared functionality for key tasks, such as reading local files, issue solved with .NET Core’s open source cross-platform approach.

Another problem was the urge to stay focused on today’s tech world needs, particularly, the need for a framework that embraces all platforms. This need was supported by the voice of many .NET developers which were shouting, for a long time, ‘.NET for Linux’. With full support from Red Hat, Microsoft replied with .NET Core 1.0 which is now available not only on Windows, OSX but also on multiple Linux distributions and open source technology.

The announcement of .NET Core 1.0 came with the surprise releases of ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework 1.0, which will help developers build applications way faster.

Software development gets redefined with .NET Core’s new improvements:

• Developing an application in Microsoft-centric tools and languages and then have the application run successfully on other platforms with no need to re-develop the app
• Building apps to mesh with Microsoft components and systems that are not open source
• Smaller footprint
• Being a modular system, developers can download and use only the functions they need for their application without carrying the entire .NET framework

Microsoft brought several improvements to ASP.NET as well

• Develop and run cross-platform ASP.NET apps on Mac, Windows, and Linux
• Built-in support for dependency injection
• Build on .NET Core, endorsing side-by-side app versioning
• Simplifies modern Web development with new tools
• Single aligned web stack for Web UI and Web APIs
• Cloud-ready environment-based configuration
• Tag helpers which make Razor markup more natural than HTML
• Ability to host on IIS or self-host in your own process
• Can be developed with C# and F# languages

.NET Core 1.0 surprises with improved offline support

Developers have also improved .NET Core’s offline support, access to 1.0 version being available offline and libraries being cached locally, which is also a feature everyone was expecting.

The platform also supports C#, VB, and F# and modern constructs like generics, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), async support and more. The Core Runtime, libraries, compiler, languages and tools are all open source on GitHub where contributions are accepted, tested and fully supported.

The release of .NET Core 1.0 brings new and exciting things for developers, so we can only wait to see what’s next!

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