Scheduled for November 2020, the release of .Net 5 will mark the beginning of an era of a new, unified platform, state Nix Solutions’ experts.
The next version of the Microsoft platform for developers, .Net 5, will remain the only branch existing today. There will be no separate releases of .Net Framework and .Net Core, says osp.ru.
According to the plans of the corporation, the release of .Net 5 will be held in November 2020. The new version of the platform will replace the open source .Net Core 3.0 software. Like .Net Core, .Net 5 will support Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, WebAssembly and other operating environments.
From the very beginning .Net Core remained a multi-platform version of .Net, while the original .Net Framework only worked on Windows. Now, after announcing that in .Net Core 3.0 the differences from .Net Framework 4.8 will be eliminated, .Net 5 can be considered the next step in the development of .Net Core. Files of program code and projects will look the same and get support for the same runtime, API and language features.
When developing .Net 5, Microsoft pursued the following goals:
- designing a single runtime and .Net platform, which should incorporate all the experience and features of runtimes accumulated by developers;
- expanding the capabilities of .Net through the use of all the best that was created in .Net Core, .Net Framework, Xamarin and Mono;
- the formation of a single base of program code, which developers will expand by common efforts.
Microsoft said .Net 5 will remain an open source cross-platform environment tightly integrated with the IDE and Visual Studio code editor. Interoperability with Java will be provided on all platforms supported by .Net 5. In addition, interoperability with Objective-C and Swift has been declared for many operating systems.
It is planned to release a new version of .Net in November of each next year. It was decided to skip version 4 in the numbering to better avoid confusion with the .Net Framework 4.x. All .Net 5 applications will use CoreFX, the current base class library for .Net Core.
Microsoft intends to distribute .Net 5 documentation to the development community counting on close feedback. The corporation promises .Net will become easier while expanding its functionality. For many types of applications, operating systems and processor architectures will be designed the same API and .Net language tools. Microsoft also promises to simplify changes during the build process.