Understanding the Journey to One .NET and .NET Support

.NET unification journey

At the Microsoft Build developer conference in May 2020, the .NET team announced that their plans to unify .NET had been delayed. They stated that .NET 5 would be released on November 10, 2020, unifying various .NET platforms except for mobile. The unified .NET platform was expected to support mobile with the release of .NET 6 in November 2021. However, in September 2021, they announced a six-month delay to .NET MAUI, their new cross-platform mobile and desktop app development platform. .NET MAUI finally reached General Availability (GA) in May 2022.

We can read the announcement at the link.

.NET Core has been renamed .NET, and the major version number skipped 4 to avoid confusion with .NET Framework 4.x. Microsoft plans to release major versions annually every November, similar to how Apple releases major versions of iOS each September.