Microsoft just updated their .NET Core version again, yes it is .NET Core 2. What changes in .NET Core 2? We will discuss it below.

Hello!!! What’s New .NET Core 2?

1. Release Date

Keep an eye on the .NET Core roadmap over at GitHub. It currently says Q2 for a preview/RC type release and Q3 for general availability. I would expect the 2.0 preview to be launched at Microsoft Build 2017.

Visual Studio 2017 was released in March 2017. As part of that, there was a bunch of .NET Core tooling improvements along with the new csproj file format.

2. .NET Standard 2.0 Expanded APIs & the Ability to Reference Full Framework Libraries

.NET Standard 2.0 will broaden the set of APIs available to include a lot of the missing features. It sounds like 2.0 will make virtually all full framework APIs available.  Some popular complaints were System.Drawing, DataTables, and others. You can search the code of over on GitHub to see the changes. Isn’t open source awesome?

One of the biggest problems with .NET Core was the lack of third party libraries. For example, when 1.0 came out, popular logging libraries like log4net were not even available (it is now). However, this was really only a problem if you wanted to deploy your app on Mac or Linux. You could have used .NET Core and targeted full .NET framework and not had these issues.

.NET Standard 2.0 has added a new compatibility shim that will enable any .NET Core app to reference any full framework library.

3. Expanded OS Support

One of the big goals with .NET Core is portability across multiple operating systems. Including desktops, servers, and even mobile. Microsoft, and the community, continue to expand the support of .NET Core. Look for the next version to continue expanding support of common Linux distros. Samsung is even working to provide support for the mobile OS Tizen.

4. Other Improvement Themes

On GitHub, the team lists these themes as being central to .NET Core 2.0.

• .NET Core Tooling – Further tooling improvements in Visual Studio
• Performance – The .NET team and community seems to be up to the challenge for ensuring .NET Core is the fastest application runtime available.
• .NET Core and Cloud – Improve how to deploy apps to Azure and troubleshoot application problems.
• Build from Source – Ability to clone the actual .NET Core source code repository and build it!