Microsoft announced today that it is releasing .NET 5.0—alongside C# 9 and F# 5—as an upgrade to .NET Core 3.x.

“.NET 5.0 is the first release in our .NET unification journey,” Microsoft’s Richard Lander explains. “We built .NET 5.0 to enable a much larger group of developers to migrate their .NET Framework code and apps to .NET 5.0. We’ve also done much of the early work in 5.0 so that Xamarin developers can use the unified .NET platform when we release .NET 6.0.”

Microsoft says that it’s already using .NET 5.0 in production and has seen major performance improvements over previous versions, which were branded as .NET Core. And having been first announced in May 2019, this day has been a long time in the making: With .NET 5.0, Microsoft begins fulfilling its vision of combining the legacy .NET Framework with the open-source .NET Core into a single platform that replaces both.

Microsoft expects to support.NET 5.0 through mid-February 2022, two months after .NET 6.0 is release. .NET 6.0, meanwhile, will be an LTS (long-term servicing) release and will be supported for three years, as was .NET Core 3.1. That said, .NET 5.0 isn’t as complete as Microsoft originally intended, and some pieces will need for .NET 6.0 before they’ll fully be transitioned.

You can learn more about .NET 5.0 from the .NET website.

Tagged with .NET 5