Telerik Ultimate Collection for .NET 2017 R3 

Docker for .NET Developers (Part 1)  

BUILD 2017 Conference Rollup for .NET Developers 

Microsoft's Plans for the Future of .NET 

Best Licensing Software for .NET Professionals

Git Training for the .NET Team 

.NET Core, the reinvention of the Microsoft .NET Framework as an open source, cross-platform development choice, is a key focus of the upcoming features planned for the Visual Studio IDE.

In conjunction with .NET Standard -- a spec detailing what .NET APIs should be available on all .NET implementations -- .NET Core retains compatibility with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono while letting developers use Windows, macOS or Linux machines to code for mobile, cloud and embedded/IoT projects.

While still primarily driven by Microsoft dev teams, .NET Core is hosted on a GitHub repository and is supported by the .NET Foundation, an independent organization created by Microsoft three years ago to improve its open source development and collaboration.

Peeking at the Visual Studio Roadmap (updated last week) reveals .NET Core figures prominently in upcoming functionality for the IDE, both in the near-term and long:  

Today, we are releasing an update to .NET 8.0.400 SDK due to an issue with (MSBuild Crash when publishing containers)[dotnet/sdk#42731].

The .NET 8.0.401 release is available for download. This SDK includes the previously released .NET 8.0.8 Runtime and is in support of Visual Studio 17.11 release. The latest 8.0 release is always listed at .NET 8.0 Releases.

.NET 6 Preview 1 is now available and ready for evaluation. This is the first preview of .NET 6, the next major update to the .NET platform. .NET 6 is expected to ship in November of this year, and will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release.