Demystifying .NET Core and .NET Standard
As the newest members of the .NET
family, there’s much confusion about .NET Core and .NET
Standard and how they differ from the .NET Framework. In this article,
I’ll explain exactly what each of these are and look at when you should choose
each one.
Before going into
detail, it’s helpful to look at the larger picture of .NET to see where .NET
Core and .NET Standard fit in. When.NET Framework first shipped 15 years ago,
it had a single .NET stack that you could use for building Windows desktop and
Web applications. Since then, other .NET implementations have emerged, such as
Xamarin, which you can use for building mobile apps for iOS and Android, as
well as macOS desktop applications
Here’s how .NET Core and .NET Standard fit
into this:
- .NET Core: This is the latest .NET implementation. It’s open
source and available for multiple OSes. With .NET Core, you can build cross-platform
console apps and ASP.NET Core Web applications and cloud services.
- .NET Standard: This is the set of fundamental APIs (commonly
referred to as base class library or BCL) that all .NET implementations
must implement. By targeting .NET Standard, you can build libraries that
you can share across all your .NET apps, no matter on which .NET
implementation or OS they run.
Introduction to .NET Core
.NET Core is a new cross-platform and fully
open source .NET implementation that was forked from .NET Framework and
Silverlight. It’s optimized for mobile and server workloads by enabling
self-contained XCOPY deployments.
To get a better feel for .NET Core, let’s take
a closer look at what developing for .NET Core looks like. And let’s do this
while exploring the new command line-based tooling. You can also use Visual
Studio 2017 for your .NET Core development, but because you’re reading this
article, chances are you’re quite familiar with Visual Studio already, so I’ll
focus on the new experience.
When .NET was created, it was heavily
optimized for rapid application development on Windows. In practice, this
means that .NET development and Visual Studio were inseparable friends. And
sure thing: Using Visual Studio for development is a blast. It’s super productive
and the debugger is hands down the best I’ve ever used.
However, there are cases where using Visual
Studio isn’t the most convenient option. Let’s say you want to just play with
.NET to learn C#: You shouldn’t have to download and install a multi-gigabyte
IDE. Or, say you’re accessing a Linux machine over SSH where using an IDE is
simply not an option. Or, say you’re simply someone who prefers using a
command-line interface (CLI).
That’s why a first-class CLI was created,
called .NET Core CLI. The .NET Core CLI’s main driver is called “dotnet.” You
can use it for virtually all aspects of your development, including creating,
building, testing and packaging projects. Let’s see what this looks like.
.Net
Framework and .Net Core both are two
different implementations of .Net Runtime. First one is older and .Net Core is
newer than .Net Framework. Difference between and .Net Framework and .Net Core
and how these both are different from .Net Standard and Why We Should Use .Net Standard.
1.
.Net Framework is
a framework for building and managing the Windows and Web-based application.
This is old framework created by Microsoft and provides end to end solution to
create Windows application generally known as Win Forms and Web Application
like Asp.Net or Asp.Net MVC application.
What we can do with .Net Framework.
a)
Create a Windows Application.
b)
Create Web Forms using Asp.Net, Rest API
using Web API and enterprise application using Asp.Net MVC
c)
Can use multiple languages, that’s why it
is language independent.
d)
Create an app with good performance.
2.
.Net Core is
a cross-platform
and open source framework for building the application
which can run on any platform. It is also created by Microsoft. It is not a new
version on .Net Framework, whereas it is a totally new framework which is
written from scratch to develop an application which can run on any platforms
like Mac, Linux or Windows. Earlier .Net Framework was Language
Independent but .Net Core is language independent as well as platforms independent.
What we can do with .Net Core.
a)
Create cross platforms application.
b)
Can use Microservices
c)
Deploy an application to Dockers
container.
d)
Create highly scalable and performable
system.
e)
Create Asp.Net Core, Razor page, UMP,
Mobile native app and Blazor application.
Before
understanding the .Net Standard, let first understand the architecture of .Net
Framework and .Net Core. We need to first understand what problem we face to
that we need to use .Net Standard. While working with either .Net Framework or
.Net Core or Xamarin application, you required Base Class Library (BCL) that is
used for sharing the code between multiple projects or solution.
We can see that each one has
its own BCL (Base Class
Library).
Problem
Example: Let assume we create an application using
.Net Framework and use its library for shared code. After some time, we feel to
create an application in .Net Core and try to re-use the same shared code
library which is created in .Net Framework.
Can we
do that? The answer is NO. We
cannot use .Net Framework Base Class Library in .Net Core because of
compatibility issues. Basically, the libraries which target to .Net Framework
can only run in .Net Framework based application and the libraries which target
to .Net Core can only run in .Net Core compatible applications.
Solution
The solution is .Net Standard. .Net Standard is a
specification of the set of APIs which is compatible for any .Net platforms
either it is .Net Framework or .Net Core. If we create the Base Class Library
using .Net Standard, then it will run with any .Net Runtimes.
So, if you are willing to create an application and
keep your shared code into Base Class Library then you should choose .Net
Standard, because it is portable with .Net Framework, .Net Core and Xamarin as
well. If in short, we say something about .Net Standard, so it will be as
follows.
1.
It is an evolution of Portable Class
Library and completely replaced to PCL.
2.
It is not a framework like .Net Framework
or .Net Core.
3.
It is the specification that needs to be
implemented by .Net Framework or .Net Core.
4.
Use for code sharing and reuse the codes
between different runtimes.
5.
Compatible with any .Net application.
AS per the above image, you can see that instead of
keeping a different-different class library for each framework, we can keep
only one as .Net Standard which rules them to all.
How
.Net Standard is backward compatible?
Each .Net Standard version contains some set of APIs
like System.Data,
System.Collections etc. If a new version of .Net Standard
gets introduced then it contains all the previous version set of APIs as well
as some of new APIs. So, it means a newer version of .Net Standard contains all
the set of APIs from beginning to end which means a higher version of .Net
Standard means more APIs availability.
If you see the compatibility with another framework,
then you will find that .Net Standard supports a wide range of Framework. You
can refer the following link for updated framework supports.
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