What is .NET?
You will learn what “.NET” is and what you can use it for. In addition, you will learn the different flavors of .NET out there.
We'll cover the following
One way to think about .NET (pronounced as “dot net”) is that it is an ecosystem consisting of a collection of runtimes, languages, frameworks, and libraries that allow you to build almost anything. You can then deploy those products in almost all popular platforms.
What can we build with .NET?
You can use .NET to make anything you want for almost all major platforms. Different frameworks within .NET will help you develop for your targeted platform and application type.
Difference between .NET Framework and .NET Core
Both .NET Framework and .NET Core are .NET implementations for building server-side applications. They share many components and enable you to share the code between them. On the surface, Microsoft released the .NET Framework on February 14, 2002. In contrast, they released .NET Core on June 27, 2016. In reality, the .NET Framework is much older and more mature than .NET Core. But the biggest advantage of .NET Core is that it is cross-platform, unlike the .NET Framework which is tied to Windows. In other words, you can run software written in .NET Core on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The differences between .NET Core and .NET Framework goes deeper, but there is one thing you should keep in mind: .NET Core works on multiple platforms. However, since it is relatively new, its feature set in terms of libraries is not as complete as .NET Framework.
What about .NET 5?
The latest version of .NET Core is version 3.1, and it is on “Long Term Support” until December 3, 2022. The latest version of the .NET Framework is version 4.8. Microsoft has planned to merge these two versions into a single entity, which is named .NET 5. It is set to be released by the end of 2020.
Even though .NET 5 is the successor to both .NET Core and .NET Framework, this does not mean that all .NET Framework technologies will work on .NET 5 since some .NET Framework technologies do not apply to the new application patterns targeted by .NET Core. Therefore, going forward, there will be only one .NET to provide support for Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Web Assembly, among others.
What is ASP.NET ?
The acronym “ASP” stands for Active Server Pages. In simple words,
What is Entity Framework?
Entity Framework is an object-database mapper. It is an abstraction layer that maps model classes to a database without having the developer create tables and set columns’ data types. It cuts down on the amount of code that needs to be written for data-access purposes. Entity Framework is not limited to supporting Microsoft SQL Server only. It also supports other databases as well: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite among others.
