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

The current documentation has a good explanation of what .NET Core is, areas to use and so on. The following characteristics best define .NET Core:

Flexible deployment: Can be included in your app or installed side-by-side user- or machine-wide.

Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux; can be ported to other OSes. The supported operating systems (OSes), CPUs and application scenarios will grow over time, provided by Microsoft, other companies, and individuals.

Command-line tools: All product scenarios can be exercised at the command-line.

Compatible: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library.

Open source: The .NET Core platform is open source, using MIT and Apache 2 licenses. Documentation is licensed under CC-BY. .NET Core is a .NET Foundation project.

Supported by Microsoft: .NET Core is supported by Microsoft, per .NET Core Support

And here is what .NET Core includes:

A .NET runtime, which provides a type system, assembly loading, a garbage collector, native interoperability and other basic services.

A set of framework libraries, which provide primitive data types, application composition types and fundamental utilities.

A set of SDK tools and language compilers that enable the base developer experience, available in the .NET Core SDK.

The 'dotnet' application host, which is used to launch .NET Core applications. It selects the runtime and hosts the runtime, provides an assembly loading policy and launches the app. The same host is also used to launch SDK tools in much the same way.