The previous version of .NET, successor of both .NET Core and .NET Framework. Use this tag for questions about .NET 5 and .NET 5's formal specification.
For the original announcement of .NET 5, and for more detailed information, please refer to the official communication from Microsoft.
What
.net-5 is the next big release to the .NET family after .NET Core 3.0. There is now just one .NET going forward, which is usable across many platforms. These platforms currently include Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, and WebAssembly, with more to be announced.
When
.net-5 was released November 10, 2020. The first preview was made available on March 16, 2020. It will be supported with future updates to Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code.
Why
.NET 5 is the next step forward with .NET Core. The project aims to improve .NET in a few key ways:
- Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.
- Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono.
- Establish a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.
- Version 4 was skipped because it would confuse users that are familiar with the .NET Framework, which has been using the 4.x series for a long time.
- 'Core' was dropped to emphasize that this is the main implementation of .NET moving forward
This new project and direction are a game-changer for .NET. With .NET 5, your code and project files will look and feel the same no matter which type of app you’re building. You’ll have access to the same runtime, API, and language capabilities with each app. This includes new performance improvements that are being committed to CoreFX regularly.
Everything you love about .NET Core will continue to exist:
- Open source and community-oriented on GitHub.
- Cross-platform implementation.
- Support for leveraging platform-specific capabilities, such as Windows Forms, WPF on Windows, and the native bindings to each native platform from Xamarin.
- High performance.
- Side-by-side installation.
- Small project files (SDK-style).
- Capable command-line interface (CLI).
- Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code integration.
Here’s what is new:
- Developers will have more choice of runtime experiences.
- Java interoperability will be available on all platforms.
- Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems.
- CoreFX will be extended to support static compilation of .NET (ahead-of-time; AOT), smaller footprints, and support for more operating systems.
- .NET 5 shipped in November 2020, with the intention to then ship a major version of .NET once a year, every November.
- This is a non LTS version, hence not recommended for production. .dotnet community planned to release every LTS version as a even versions, .i.e., .net6, .net8...
