Microsoft has announced the availability of .NET Core 2.0 as a final release as the company ingratiates its more open strategy further still.
New features and upgrades include ‘major’ performance improvements in runtime and framework, support of six new platforms, including macOS High Sierra and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2, and dotnet restore becoming an implicit command. The .NET Standard 2.0 spec, which you can find here, was finalised at the same time as .NET Core 2.0.
Users who want to get started with .NET Core 2.0 can use templates already in Visual Studio 2017, or create new applications at the command line with dotnet new. Those who continue to use applications on .NET Core 1.0 and 1.1 will automatically continue in those runtimes unless explicitly updated.
The company says a lot of the performance changes over the past year have come from the .NET community rather than from Microsoft. Microsoft called out Samsung and Qualcomm for specific thanks in the announcement, with Scott Hunter, Microsoft director of program management, explaining in a video: “Because we’re always focusing on new web frameworks or new libraries to bring into .NET, making it cross-platform, we don’t always have a chance to look at all the bugs out there and dig into all that code.
“One of the cool things about being an open source project [is] we’ve had tons of submissions from the community that have fixed performance problems.”
As an article for Business Insider pointed out, Microsoft’s previous attitude towards .NET, first released in 2002, was to be “just another way that Microsoft leveraged its power to keep Windows at the centre of the universe.” Times have certainly changed since those days.
Read the full announcement here.
