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title .NET Products
description .NET Products
keywords .NET, .NET Core
author richlander
manager wpickett
ms.date 06/23/2016
ms.topic article
ms.prod .net-core
ms.technology .net-core-technologies
ms.devlang dotnet
ms.assetid 2e38e9d9-8284-46ee-a15f-199adc4f26f4

.NET Products

.NET is a very flexible, general purpose and inherently cross-platform specification for building developer products. It is used for all of the most popular app categories: desktop, mobile, cloud, gaming and IoT.

There are two subtly different terms used in this document:

  • ".NET product" - Enables you to build an app for one or more target platforms.
  • ".NET implementation" - Some combination of a runtime, framework and tools that can execute ".NET code" on which products are based.

Product Categories

.NET products are available for each of the following product categories.

Desktop

You can build desktop apps for Windows and macOS.

Games

You can build games for many desktop, mobile, console and virtual/agumented reality devices.

IoT

You can build IoT apps for Windows 10 IoT Core, including Raspberry Pi 2/3.

Mobile

You can build Mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows.

Web and Cloud

You can build Web and Cloud apps for Windows and Linux.

.NET Implementations

Major commercial and open source .NET implementations are listed below, in alphabetical order.

.NET Core

.NET Core is used to build device, web, cloud and embedded/IoT apps. It is open source and cross-platform, supporting Windows, macOS and Linux. ASP.NET Core is the most popular workload for .NET Core. You can use it to build web apps and services, for on-premises and cloud deployment. You can also use .NET Core to build tools, utilities and cloud worker apps.

The following are the main characteristics of .NET Core:

Cross-platform - .NET Core supports three operating systems families: Linux, Windows and macOS. .NET Core apps are cross-platform by default. You can write apps and libraries that run unmodified across supported OSes.

Open Source - .NET Core is available on GitHub, licensed with the MIT and Apache 2 licenses (licensing is per component). Documentation is CC-BY. .NET Core also makes use of a significant set of open source industry dependencies, listed in the .NET Core release notes.

Natural acquisition - NET Core is distributed in several forms, aligning with specific developer needs. You can acquire .NET Core with the .NET Core SDK installer (or zips) or via OS-specific package managers, such as APT and Yum. Official .NET Core Docker images are available on Docker Hub. Higher-level framework libraries and the larger .NET library ecosystem are available on NuGet.

Modular platform - .NET Core is built with a modular design, enabling applications to include only the .NET Core libraries and dependencies that are needed. Each application makes its own .NET Core versioning choices, avoiding conflicts with shared components. This approach aligns with the trend of developing software using container technologies like Docker.

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is used to build apps for Windows and Windows Server. You can use it to build rich user interfaces with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) and Windows Forms. It also supports building server apps with ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC and Windows Communication Framework (WCF). Visual Studio provides rich designer experiences for the .NET Framework, making it easy to build both client and server apps. It is the best choice for writing apps for Windows.

Windows Forms enables you to build a "forms over data" desktop UI more rapidly than any other technology. It uses a designer that enables drag-and-drop of UI and non-UI controls, reducing most development tasks into a single gesture and conceptual model.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) separates code and UI concerns by describing UI with the XAML markup language. WPF is very flexible and is often used for UIs that require a more complex user model or a more elegant appearance.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a set of libraries for SOAP Web Services. It allows you to create services that can communicate through various supported protocols using various data formats, and that can be hosted in any process you choose. This leads to one of the major features of WCF: your services are not tied to any particular hosting strategy or approach.

ASP.NET is a web framework. It has several distinct pieces which are used to produce modern and high-performance web applications.

  • ASP.NET Web Forms enables you to build a "forms over data" UI more radidly than most other Web technologies, with a designer that enables drag-and-drop of web controls.
  • ASP.NET MVC gives you greater control over the entire web pipeline, from the HTTP layer to the user interface.
  • ASP.NET WebAPI is a convention-based framework for creating REST services.
  • SignalR allows you to provide push-based communication to your web applications using the WebSocket protocol.

.NET Native

.NET Native is a set of native build tools for .NET Core. .NET Native is an Ahead-of-Time (AOT) toolchain that produces native applications by compiling IL byte code to native machine code. This means that the resulting binary is what the OS executes; there is no JIT-ing, no runtime compilation. This leads to better startup performance, as well as some security benefits.

.NET Native is primarily used by .NET Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications.

Mono

Mono is the original open source and cross-platform implementation of .NET, from the community Mono Project. It is now sponsored by Microsoft. It can be thought of as an open and cross-platform version of the .NET Framework. Its APIs follow the progress of the .NET Framework, not .NET Core.

There are several components that make up Mono:

C# Compiler - Mono’s C# compiler is feature complete for C# 6.

Mono Runtime - The runtime implements the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The runtime provides a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler, an Ahead-of-Time compiler (AOT), a library loader, the garbage collector, a threading system and interoperability functionality.

Base Class Library - The Mono platform provides a comprehensive set of classes that provide a solid foundation to build applications on. These classes are compatible with Microsoft’s .Net Framework classes.

Mono Class Library - Mono also provides many classes that go above and beyond the Base Class Library provided by the .NET Framework. These provide additional functionality that are useful, especially in building Linux applications. Some examples are classes for Gtk+, Zip files, LDAP, OpenGL, Cairo, POSIX, etc.

Xamarin SDK

The Xamarin SDK is used to build native mobile and device apps, primarily for Apple and Google ecosystems. It is based on Mono and is open source using the MIT license. You can use it to build iOS and Android apps for phones, tablets and watches. Xamarin.Forms is a popular way to write reusable UIs across Apple, Google and Windows apps.