News

Open Source .NET Core 1.0 Released by Microsoft

• By Michael Domingo
• June 29, 2016

Describing the move as "the biggest transformation of .NET since its inception," Microsoft this week announced the open source release of .NET Core 1.0, along with ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0.

".NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern Web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications," Microsoft exec Rich Lander said in a blog post this week. "This is the biggest transformation of .NET since its inception and will define .NET for the next decade," Lander continued. "We've rebuilt the foundation of .NET to be targeted at the needs of today's world: highly distributed cloud applications, micro services and containers."

Exec Joseph Sirosh lauded the open source implications of the new initiative in his own blog post.

"This is a huge accomplishment for the entire open source ecosystem -- with more than 18,000 developers representing more than 1,300 companies contributing to .NET Core 1.0," Sirosh said. "The new version also includes the first release of the .NET Standard Library, which will enable developers to reuse their code and skills for applications that run on servers, the cloud, desktops and across any device including Windows, iOS and Android."

Microsoft also announced finalized versions of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. The company had been expected to release gold code versions before the month closed out.

The Visual Studio release as usual includes Team Foundation Server 2015, which provides for enterprise-level services for testing, source code control, and build management. John Montgomery, Microsoft's director of program management for Visual Studio, in a blog, writes about two key issues that beguiled the VS team over the past several months leading up to the release: performance and stability. Two large customers using Visual Studio in particular had the issues.

"Both had reached out to us with saying they were having problems with sluggishness and stability when dealing with solution files containing 100s of projects and millions of files," wrote Montgomery. "One customer, for example, had a solution file with 500 projects (all .NET), which was making VS hang and crash from anywhere within five to 60 minutes of opening a solution. Another customer had a solution file with 200 projects (mostly .NET, but a handful of C++ projects)."

The issues seeme related, Montgomery said, but some investigation led to the identification of two distinct and complex issues that took months to resolve, as well as "engineers from five or six feature teams to diagnose and fix them," said Montgomery. The resulting issues have been resolved, he said, and have been incorporated into U3.

There are a slew of improvements and enhancements, which are listed in the release notes. Some highlights: Tools for Apache Cordova 10; Developer Analytics Tools 7.0.2; Diagnostics Tools support; Tools for Universal Windows Apps, with support for UWP apps that use .NET Native 1.4; inclusion of Node.js 1.2 RC; support for TypeScript 1.8.34; inclusion of Xamarin 4.1, to name a few.

The .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and Entity Framework Core 1.0 releases come with a renaming/reversioning of the Web framework tools to 1.0 that was done back in early January this year to reflect the massive rewriting and optimizing of the code base.

"As part of this release we are making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized," writes Jeffrey T. Fritz, Microsoft's senior program manager for the developers outreach group, in a blog announcing it. As such, he said to consider this a true version 1.0 solution that still has room for improvement and enhancement. "Features like SignalR and Web Pages will come later in the year and other features like Web Forms which are deeply tied to System.Web will remain in the .NET 4.x framework."

The releases include the release of the .NET Standard Library, which enables the solutions to be cross-platform enabled. The 1.0 solutions also already support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Open Shift. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially announced the 1.0 solutions at the Red Hat Summit taking place in San Francisco this week. (An on-demand feed of Microsoft's announcement is available here on the Channel 9 site.)

Versions of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 10 can be downloaded at this link; there are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Docker available there. It's also included in the tooling options that can be installed as part of VS 2015 U3, which is available here.