Evolution of .NET

Microsoft first started working on .NET at the turn of the century and released the first version of .NET around 18 years ago, in 2002. Then, it released its version 1.1 in 2003, version 2.0 in 2005, and so on. It is worth noting that there was no consistency in the release cycle.

Back then, it used to be known as Microsoft .NET Framework, but later, they commonly referred to it as .NET Framework. four years ago, in 2016, it emerged with a big shift vis-à-vis the open source world and with its primary focus on performance and backend applications, going by the name of .NET Core.

.NET Framework initially was a Windows-only platform and, not long after, there were non-Microsoft public domain ports to other Unix-based platforms with the name of Mono. Over time, Mono saw a lot of success with the general .NET Framework. In due course, we saw the emergence and popularity of Xamarin as a .NET-based platform for smartphone app development. Xamarin was based on Mono and was actually developed by the same engineers.

In 2016, Microsoft acquired Xamarin and, in the same year, it also introduced .NET Core as a free, open source, and managed framework for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It was a cross-platform and slim version of .NET Framework. With .NET Core, Microsoft's focus shifted toward open source technologies, embracing the advent of cloud-native development and container-based architecture in platforms other than just Windows. .NET Core 2.0 was released in August 2017, and .NET Core 3.0 in May 2019.

In 2020, Microsoft's vision is One.NET. What this means is that they want to avoid confusion and go fully open source with support for all platforms across all feature sets, in other words, merge .NET Framework and .NET Core. Hence, the next major release after .NET Core 3.1 will be .NET 5. From a developer's perspective, .NET is a cross-platform runtime with a huge class library that contains all the essential elements required to code web, desktop, or mobile applications; platform-specific as well as cloud-native across various tech verticals.

Programs in .NET can be developed with a variety of programming languages such as C++, Visual Basic, and Fortran (as F#), with C# being the most popular. C# is a feature-rich, object-oriented programming language initially based on the syntax of C/C++ and Java.

Any language used for programming in .NET meets a set of minimum requirements in terms of using the .NET class libraries. These requirements are called the Common Language Specification (CLS). They share a Common Type System (CTS), such as basic data types (integers and strings). CLS and CTS are also a part of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). CLI is an open specification that was actually developed by Microsoft and then standardized by ISO as well as ECMA.

.NET programs are compiled to a processor-independent intermediate language (IL). When .NET-based apps run on a particular platform, IL is compiled into a native code of the processor by a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. JIT compilation is implemented by the platform-specific Common Language Runtime (CLR). Code written in .NET is known as managed code since the actual machine language is translated by the CLR.

In every .NET program, CLR provides garbage collection services. It determines whether a memory block is no longer referenced by any variable in the application and will free up that fragment of memory as and when required.

.NET Core uses consistent and well-defined API models, written in what is called.NET Standard, which makes it portable and usable to many .NET applications. In this way, the same .NET library can be used in multiple platforms and in multiple languages. If you build the .NET Standard version as the target for the assembly of your .NET library instead of .NET Framework or .NET Core, then your library will be able to use both .NET Framework and .NET Core.

Now that we have covered a bit of the history regarding .NET Framework and .NET Core, let's look at the last big part of this chapter – learning about the distinguishing factors in .NET versions.