What is “.NET Core”?

Question

Recently in an official .NET Framework Blog it was announced that .NET Core is going open source.

Ironically, the author mentions that what .NET Core is wil

Answer 1

It is a sub-set of the .NET Framework, started with the Compact Framework edition. It progressed into Silverlight, Windows Store and Windows Phone. It focused on keeping the deployment small, suitable for quick downloads and devices with limited storage capabilities. And it is easier to bring up on non-Windows platforms, and surely this was the reason it was chosen as the open sourced edition. The "difficult" and "expensive" parts of the CLR and the base class libraries are omitted.

Otherwise, it is always easy to recognize when you target such a framework version, because lots of goodies will be missing. You'll be using a distinct set of reference assemblies that only expose what is supported by the runtime. It is stored on your machine in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETCore directory.

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Update: after the .NET Core 2.0 release I've seen some representative numbers that gives a decent insight. They have been hard at work back-porting framework APIs to .NET Core over the past two years. .NET Core 1.0 originally supported 13,000 APIs. .NET Core 2.0 added 20,000 APIs, bringing the total to 32,000 and allowing about 70% of existing NuGet packages to be ported. There are a set of APIs that are too heavily wedded to Windows to be easy to port to Linux and MacOS. Covered by the recently released Windows Compatibility Pack, it adds another 20,000 APIs.