One of the most valuable ideas of Microsoft includes .NET. Microsoft initiated this idea in the 1990’s under the Next Generation Windows Services and they released their first beta version in late 2000. .NET Framework 1.0 was officially release on February 13, 2002 which can be used by Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
The birth of .NET includes some positivity and also some negativity. They took all the negativity and they keep on improving the .NET platform. Initially they started off with .NET Framework. But now we have three .NET platforms such as,
- .NET Framework
- .NET Core
- .NET Standard
In this blog, we’ll see how these platforms evolved and also we have a cool news at the end of this blog.
.NET Framework
As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft they started off with .NET Framework. And taking the negativity of 1.0 they made some improvements and they release .NET Framework 2.0 on January 22, 2006 and it’s SDK was launched in 2006. It’s the last version which supported Windows ME and Windows 98.
.NET Framework 3.0
It was launched on November 21, 2006 and it was formerly recognized as WinFx.
It has embraced rich GUI capabilities which ensured an user-friendly communication.
The four core components launched in this version are Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF), Windows Communication Founcation(WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation(WWF) and Windows Cardspace.
.NET Framework 3.5
The version 3.5 was launched on November 19, 2007 and it is supported on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 etc.,
The powerful LINQ features has been introduced in this version and there were some enhancements done in WCF, WPF and WF.
.NET Framework 4.0 & .NET Framework 4.5
The version 4.0 was launched on April 12, 2010. The main feature introduced in 4.0 is parallel computing for distributed or multi-core systems.
The version 4.5 was launched on August 15, 2012. They brought some programming languages support such as C#, F# or just create an windows Applications. It also had minor releases 4.5.1 and 4.5.2 which some features and enhancements included.
.NET Framework 4.6
The version 6.0 was released on July 20, 2015. It supports RyuJIT, a new just in time compiler for 64-bit. This version supports Windows SP2, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2.
And also it has minor version releases such as 4.6.1 and 4.6.2. It included some features like spell checking, Image generator, Indexed members etc.
.NET Framework 4.7 & .NET Framework 4.8
4.7 was launched on May 2, 2017. In this version they introduced Object Cache Extensibility with .NET. And also it included vast performance improvements. It has Improved TLS, Enhanced Cryptography, High DPI support etc., It also had some minor version releases such as 4.7.1 and 4.7.2 which included some additional features.
4.8 was launched on was launched on April 18, 2019.The major bugs of 4.x have been fixed in this version and also it had some additional features like JIT improvements, Updated ZLib, Accessibility enhancements etc.
.NET Core
ASP.NET Core is ruling the world for the last four years. And also it’s an important revolution to .NET platform that changed the whole Microsoft approach to software development. There are various versions of .NET Core involved such as 1.x, 2.x and 3.x. The main advantage of using .NET Core over .NET Framework is they support to build cross platform applications.
.NET Core 1.x
ASP.NET Core 1.0 was release on Q3 2016. It’s the complete re-implementation of .NET Framework. The new framework introduced a fully-featured cross-platform component shipped with the whole set of open-source tools. So it includes
- Roslyn – A compiler platform
- CoreCLR – A Cross platform runtime
- RyuJIT – Just In Time Compiler
And after that 1.1 was released on Q4 2016 which brought some new features and enhancements to middlewares, URL Rewrite module and Compression and Caching.
.NET Core 2.x
The version 2.0 was launched on Q3 2017. It has some wide number of signification interface improvements, mostly aimed to standardize the API’s among .NET Framework and .NET Core.
The version 2.1 was launched on May 30, 2018. It included some features like SignalR, Razor Class libraries which makes the .NET Core more powerful. And also HTTPS support was enabled by default and they introduced built in GDPR support.
And also they introduced some templates to communicated with the font-end frameworks like Angular and React.
.NET Core 3.x
The version 3.0 was release on September 2019. It had some wide variety of performance and security improvements such as Windows desktop applications support and C# 8 support.
And also you can create single-file executable and there were various commands introduced to build and publish your .NET Core applications.
.NET Standard
.NET Standard is a platform which is mostly used to create libraries because it will be supported by both .NET Framework and .NET Core. And also it brings uniformity in the .NET ecosystem.
.NET Standard 1.x
There were several versions introduced in .NET Standard from 1.0 to 1.6 and they maintain a table where the support of libraries for .NET Framework and .NET Core.
| .NET Standard | 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 2.0 | 2.1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .NET Core | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 2.0 | 3.0 |
| .NET Framework 1 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5.1 | 4.6 | 4.6.1 | 4.6.1 2 | 4.6.1 2 | 4.6.1 2 | N/A3 |
| Mono | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 5.4 | 6.4 |
| Xamarin.iOS | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.14 | 12.16 |
| Xamarin.Mac | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 3.8 | 5.16 |
| Xamarin.Android | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 10.0 |
| Universal Windows Platform | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 10.0.16299 | 10.0.16299 | 10.0.16299 | TBD |
| Unity | 2018.1 | 2018.1 | 2018.1 | 2018.1 | 2018.1 | 2018.1 | 2018.1 |
Source: .NET Standard documentation
- The columns represent .NET Standard versions. Each header cell is a link to a document that shows which APIs got added in that version of .NET Standard.
- The rows represent the different .NET implementations.
- The version number in each cell indicates the minimum version of the implementation you’ll need in order to target that .NET Standard version.
- For an interactive table, see .NET Standard versions.
.NET Standard 2.x
There are some improvements done in .NET Standard 2.x versions but nothing major. Microsoft mainly concentrated on .NET Framework and .NET Core.
Conclusion
We have seen about the .NET revolution and there was an important announcement in the latest Microsoft Conference. All these platforms will be combined together and herafter it will called as .NET 5.
Yes there won’t be .NET Framework, .NET Core or .NET Standard. It’s just .NET 5.
In our next blog, we will explore about an .NET package called Benchmark .NET.
Happy Coding!
Cheers! 🙂
DevSuhas 
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