.NET Core 2.0 is available!
By Rich Lander
As of Monday, .NET Core 2.0 is available! You can now start developing with it at the command line, in your favourite text editor, and in the latest versions of Visual Studio. .NET Core 2.0 has also been deployed to Azure Web Apps, and is now available in all Azure regions.
We are also releasing ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Entity Framework Core 2.0 - you can watch the launch video on Channel 9 to see many of the new features in action.
The .NET Standard 2.0 spec is complete, finalised at the same time as .NET Core 2.0. The .NET Standard is a key effort to improve code sharing and to make the APIs available in each .NET implementation more consistent. .NET Standard 2.0 more than doubles that set of APIs that you have available for your projects.
Here are just some of the improvements that come with .NET Core 2.0:
Runtime
- Major performance improvements in the runtime and framework
- Implements .NET Standard 2.0
- 6 new platforms supported, including Debian Stretch, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2, and macOS High Sierra.
- RyuJIT is the x86 JIT in .NET Core 2.0
- Linux and Windows ARM32 builds now available, in preview.
SDK
dotnet restoreis now an implicit command.- .NET Core and .NET Standard projects can reference .NET Framework NuGet packages and projects.
- The .NET Core SDK can be built from source with the source-build repo.
Visual Studio
- Live Unit Testing supports .NET Core
- Code navigation improvements
- C# Azure Functions support in the box
- CI/CD support for containers
Visual Studio users will need to update to the latest versions of Visual Studio to use .NET Core 2.0. You will need to install the .NET Core 2.0 SDK separately for this update.
Using .NET Core 2.0
You can get started with .NET Core 2.0 in just a few minutes, on Windows macOS or Linux. You can download the SDK here. For a more detailed breakdown of the changes and improvements that come with .NET Core 2.0, read the full article on the .NET blog.
Also, be sure to sign up for .NET Conf! .NET Conf is a free, 3 day virtual developer event co-organised by the .NET community and Microsoft. You can find more details on the official website.