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! 

Unhandled exceptions are a bit of a misnomer. In .NET, every exception is handled. By the time you access the specifics of an error in your Try-Catch block, the Framework has already analyzed the problem, built a structure to contain its details, examined the stack trace, and used reflection to pinpoint the location of the error, among other mundane tasks. In short, when errors occur, .NET serves them up to your code in a neatly packaged, highly examinable data block.

MVC 6 should be out any day, so we need to be prepared.

The good thing is, it’s all very similar to MVC 5; the even better thing is, it got better! A couple of ways it is so cool, in my mind, are:

For those who don’t know, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is alive and well, and has been ported to .NET Core as Microsoft.Composition.

Invoking event handlers in C# has always been a bit of a pain, because an event with no subscribers is usually represented as a null reference. 

Haxe is an open source toolkit based on a modern high level strictly typed programming language, a state-of-the-art light-speed cross-compiler, a complete cross-platform standard library, and ways to access to each platform's native capabilities.