.NET Core 1.0—the open-sourced, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s web development framework—is now generally available. The release Monday caps two years of effort, in which nearly 10,000 developers participated, according to Microsoft.
.NET Core 1.0 will allow developers to create web apps, micro-services and libraries that work on OS X and Linux as well as Windows. Microsoft will be working with Red Hat to support .NET on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and platform-as-a-service OpenShift 3, the two companies announced at this week’s Red Hat DevNation conference.
“This is the biggest transformation of .NET since its inception and will define .NET for the next decade,” reads the statement on Microsoft’s .NET blog. “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.”
Developers can begin building .NET Core apps using Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, also available starting Monday. The release includes the .NET Core runtime, libraries and tools and the ASP.NET Core libraries.
Other improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 include new Apache Cordova tools and analytics tools, including one for finding trends in your app’s telemetry, and an update of Node.js Tools. There’s also a number of bug fixes. And this version of Visual Studio comes with Xamarin 4.1. The update can be installed on top of previous versions of VS 2015.