What’s New in .NET 5 | The Future of .Net?

.NET – A Unified Platform:
The .NET going forward and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more.

We will introduce new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities and language features as part of .NET 5.

Everything you love about .NET Core will continue to exist:

1. Open source and community-oriented on GitHub.

2. Cross-platform implementation.

3. Support for leveraging platform-specific capabilities, such as Windows Forms and WPF on Windows and the native bindings to each native platform from Xamarin.

4. High performance.

5. Side-by-side installation.

6. Small project files (SDK-style).

7. Capable command-line interface (CLI).

8. Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code integration.

.NET 5 Key Features -

.NET 5 key features include the following:

1. A single unified platform for everything including Windows, Mac, Web, Mobile, Cloud, IoT, Gaming, Machine Learning and Data Science.

2. Managed by open source community and supported by Microsoft.

3. Cross-platform with any device anywhere.

4. Supports all major platform capabilities for .NET Framework, .NET Core and Xamarin including Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, LINQ and so on.

5. Scalable, fast, and high performance.

6. Smaller deployment and packages.

7. Support of the most productive IDEs and tools including Visual Studio, VS Code, VS for Mac, and Command Line Interface (CLI)

Is .NET 5 = .NET Core vNext?

.NET 5 is the next step forward with .NET Core.

1. Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.

2. Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono.

Build that product out of a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.

.NET 5 Release Date:

The .NET 5 will is expected to be released in Nov 2020. The first preview of .NET 5 is expected to be available in the first half of 2020 that will be supported by Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code. Here is a schedule announced by the .NET Team via their blog.