.NET Core 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available. This release contains only a handful of bug fixes and closely represents what we expect to release for .NET Core 3.0. 

For now, Microsoft's .NET Core milestones page shows .NET 5.0 about 53 percent complete, with 1,066 issues open and 1,216 issues closed.

Highlights of .NET 5 include:

• Developers will have more choice on runtime experiences.
• Java interoperability will be available on all platforms.
• Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems.
• CoreFX will be extended to support static compilation of .NET (ahead-of-time – AOT), smaller footprints and support for more operating systems. 

There are two supported choices of runtime for building server-side applications with .NET: .NET Framework and .NET Core. Both share a lot of the same .NET platform components and you can share code across the two. However, there are fundamental differences between the two and your choice will depend on what you want to accomplish. This article provides guidance on when to use each. 

It has only been about a year since .NET Core 1.0 RC came out. We are now getting close to .NET Core 2.0. We have been playing with .NET Core since the betas and feel like the quality of the 1.0 runtime was very good. Our only complaint has really been odd Visual Studio behavior. We would expect that with 2.0, the adoption of .NET Core is likely to skyrocket. 

A beginner-friendly, and free, course to help you take your first steps as a DevOps engineer is available as a series of YouTube videos. 

LINQ explained with sketches - the eBook 

Should I avoid LINQ for performance reasons? 

Democratizing GPGPU programming through OpenCL and LINQ.