As anyone in the .NET community who hasn't been living under a rock will know, there's a lot of exciting things happening with .NET at the moment with the announcement of the open source, cross platform, .NET Core. However, partly due to the very open nature of its evolution, there's been a whole host of names associated with its development - vNext, ASP.NET 5, ASP.NET Core, .NET generations etc.

In this post I'm going to try and clarify some of the naming and terminology surrounding the evolution of the .NET framework. I'll discuss some of the challenges the latest iteration is attempting to deal with and how the latest developments aim to address these.

This is really for those that have seen some of the big announcements but aren't sure about the intricacies of this new framework and how it relates to the existing ecosystem, which was my situation before I really started digging into it all properly!

Hopefully by the end of this article you'll have a clearer grasp of the latest in .NET! 

.NET Core 2.1.0 (along with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core) will be released around May 30th, but for folks who can't wait until then and would like to get their hands on the bits a little early, read on! 

Missing Features in Entity Framework Core
Here’s a brief summary of some of the features that were present in previous versions of Entity Framework (6.x) and were excluded (or are not yet implemented) in Entity Framework Core 2.0: 

Today, the Entity Framework Core team announces the sixth preview release of EF Core 5.0. This release includes split queries for related collections, a new “index” attribute, improved exceptions related to query translations, IP address mapping, exposing transaction id for correlation, and much more. 

#105 Jon Smith, Entity Framework Core 2.1 and Domain Driven Design 

Using Entity Framework Core with WPF on .NET Core 3.0 

Generate ASP.NET Core WebAPI model with Entity Framework Core Generator 

Application triggers for Asp.Net Core 2.1 entity framework core