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! 

"Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language," the .NET team said. "This supports language stability and maintains compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic. Future features of .NET Core that require language changes may not be supported in Visual Basic. Due to differences in the platform, there will be some differences between Visual Basic on .NET Framework and .NET Core."  

"We migrated Stack Overflow's ad server from .NET 4.6.2 to .NET 5.0 and we are testing it on a canary server in production. We are seeing big improvements in memory usage and in server response times. It wasn't the main goal of the migration, but definitely a nice to have" / Twitter 

If you been given the unenviable task of migrating your .NET Core project from ‘project.json’ to MSBuild (csproj), you are likely to find your muscle memory disrupted and the documentation lacking. Automated upgrades in Visual Studio and .NET Core CLI may aut 

Entity Framework Core (EF Core) 7 is available on NuGet today!

EF Core 7 is the successor to EF Core 6, and can be referred to as EF7 for brevity. EF Core 7 contains many features that help in porting “classic” EF6 applications to use EF7. As such, we encourage people to upgrade existing classic EF applications to use EF7 where possible. See Porting from EF6 to EF Core for more information. 

Entity Signal allows you to connect to Entity Framework through SignalR and get updates on subscribed data in real time. This lowers the number of refreshes done by the user and ultimatly allows you to do more with fewer servers. It is also requires minimal changes, so you can make realtime apps about as easily as you can make standard apps.  

Ever wondered how JWT came to be and what problems it was designed to tackle? Are you curious about the plethora of algorithms available for signing and encrypting JWTs? Or are you interested in getting up-to-speed with JWTs as soon as possible? Then this handbook is for you. 

Join us on November 8, for the launch of Visual Studio 2022. Learn about what's new, hear tips & tricks, participate in the live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin.