.NET Core

Some important constituents of .NET Core include

• .NET Core runtime (type system, loading assemblies, garbage collector, native interop etc)
• ASP.NET runtime
• .NET Core CLI tools
• dotnet.exe

The *.NET Core SDK* consists of tools and libraries that can be used (or are required?) to create .NET Core applications or libraries.

The .NET Core SDK includes

• The .NET Core CLI
• NET Core libraries and runtime (for building and running apps)
• dotnet.exe

*.NET Core CLI* is the (cross-platform) toolchain to develop .NET Core applications.

.NET Core supports three app models:

• ASP.NET apps and services
• Console apps
• Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps

The next release of .NET core will be .NET 5.

.NET 5 tries to unify all .NET runtimes and frameworks.

.NET implementation differences

The automatic PowerShell variable $psEdition is set to Core if the respective PowerShell sessions uses .NET core.

Some information about a .NET Core installation can be queried with dotnet --info.

The root installation directory for .NET Core is C:\Program Files\dotnet. The .NET Core versions are installed below C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk.

The default encoding on .NET Core is UTF-8 (See [System.Text.Encoding::Default.EncodingName]).

.NET Core (et al) can be downloaded from dotnet.microsoft.com/download.

CoreFX is the foundational class libraries for .NET Core. It includes types for collections, file systems, console, JSON, XML, async and many others.