Say hello to Rider “.NET Core edition”! The backend now can be run on the .NET Core runtime instead of Mono on macOS and Linux! Enable it in "Help | Switch IDE runtime to .NET Core". Enjoy the performance boost and a lower memory footprint!  

.NET Conf: Focus on Windows is a free, one-day livestream event that features speakers from the community and Microsoft teams working on Windows desktop apps and making them fantastic on the latest .NET 5. Learn why and how to upgrade WPF and Windows Forms apps to .NET 5, see Visual Studio tooling improvements, learn how to leverage cloud services from your client apps, and a whole lot more. You'll also see what the future of native device development with .NET will look like in .NET 6.  

Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is the latest version of Microsoft's recommended data access technology for applications based on the .NET Core framework. It has been designed to be lightweight, extensible and to support cross platform development. 

Q: What's the near-term roadmap for .NET tooling?

A: While tentative, here are some short term plans:

• Sep 2016 – Preview 3 of VS 2015 with early .CSProj support for .NET Core
• Nov 2016 – .NET Core 1.2, ASP.NET Core 1.2, Entity Framework Core 1.2, SignalR, .NET Standard 2.0, etc.  

Various .NET Core repos have switched their master branches to "5.0", and will use 3.x branches for 3.0 and 3.1 projects. This is very similar to how we approached 2.x and 3.0 projects. As context, master branches produced 3.0 builds for the entire period of the 2.2 project.