There was simply the.NET framework at first. In addition to being incredibly well-liked and well-liked by the populace, it also inspired strong loyalty in those who took pleasure in it.

However, Microsoft saw a chance to spread its Windows-only.NET Framework to other platforms. They added a new version of the.NET Framework called.NET Core to their maze of various.NET Frameworks. Imagine.NET Core as a pot of rich chicken soup.

But quite soon it became clear that the two groups weren’t compatible and didn’t want to eat each other’s food, exactly like.NET Framework and.NET Core.

Following returning to the drawing board and realizing that there had to be a method to bring together the Windows-specific and cross-platform camps, Microsoft created.NET Standard.

In essence, this architecture connects Windows to other operating systems. For instance, the project must be targeted to.NET Standard 1.1 if you wish to run.NET Framework 4.5 with.NET Core 2.1.

The most popular version as of late last year is plain old.NET, a standard collection of application programming interfaces that may be used with Windows, MacOS, iOS, Linux, Android, and anything else.

 

What Is It?

In order to create Windows programs and web browsers utilizing a variety of different programming languages, including C#, Visual Studio, F#, and others, the original.NET Framework was first developed back in 2000. Since it was Microsoft’s first managed framework and they had the majority of the market at the time, .NET was quickly embraced by the IT industry and is still in use today, more than 20 years after its first release.

A more flexible foundation and the necessity for cross-platform development led to the 2016 introduction of.NET Core. Microsoft had to effectively start from scratch to create .NET Core, a complete redesign of the .NET specifications that carried out the same functions on various operating systems.

The major issue was that the Windows native.NET and.NET Core were utterly incompatible due to their differing architectural foundations, so.NET Standard was created instead, later that year, in 2016, as a collection of libraries and application programming interfaces (APIs) that could be utilized across all.NET and.NET Core platforms.

This was, at best, a clumsy band-aid fix, and in November 2020,.NET 5, a new iteration of the framework that genuinely unifies.NET without the need for several revisions and architecture was published. The brand-new.NET 5 is composed of standard sets of APIs that work with all operating systems.