Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyjarrett | Hacker News Reader

1. .NET "Core" ... I tell myself "C is for Cross platform." This is usually what people seem like they mean now when they talk about ".NET".

2. .NET "Framework" ... I tell myself "F is for Former." This is the older, Windows specific version.

3. .NET "Standard" ... I tell myself "S is for Specification." This is just the spec which defines what Core and Framework must implement.

View on HN

I think .NET "Standard" is deprecated. Per this article. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-future-of-net-stan...

Though reading through it, I am still confused.

.NET Standard specified a common API that was implemented by the .NET Core and .NET Framework runtimes, allowing library authors to easily target both platforms.

.NET Standard solved a problem at the time but as elucidated in the article, it turned out not to be the right solution in the long term. .NET Framework is essentially in maintenance mode and won't be receiving new language features, so new .NET Standard versions don't make much sense given the overhead they introduce. Newer versions of .NET will still be able to build and run libraries targeting .NET Standard but no new .NET Standard versions will be released.

Greenfield projects now typically target what was previously called .NET Core. With the removal of .NET Standard, .NET Core was renamed to .NET to reflect the fact that it's the whole ecosystem as far as any future development is concerned.

So the bottom line is that .NET Core can't call a .NET Framework library. It must be converted to .NET Standard first. And despite deprecation (let's call it that), .NET 5, 6, 7, 8 will continue to support calling into .NET Standard libraries.

I am not sure this is (still) correct - I am able to call into a .NET framework 4.8 library from .NET 7.

If it's built against .NET 4.8 but only uses the API surface subset that corresponds to .NET Standard, that works - but then it's effectively a .NET Standard library with metadata not properly reflecting that.

Since .NET Fx 4.7 or 4.8 libraries consumed via NuGet are "assumed" .NET Standard 2.0 unless proven otherwise for maximal compatibility with old code.

That’s super helpful, thank you.

Where it still gets a bit murky is:

> “ .NET has many different implementations, including the .NET Framework, Mono, and Unity. Each of these is a separate platform with separate Base Class Libraries (BCLs) and app models. .NET Core is another separate platform.”

You don’t really interact with or care about mono as A normal c# dev

Mono is almost entirely merged in .NET 8. Very few parts of "mono" exist now as a separate runtime.

It's just .NET going forward (for now) if you don't need to worry about any old stuff.

The issue is with Googling (or Binging if you’re so inclined). If you google ".NET foobar", you might get answers for .NET Core, but you might also get old answers for the .NET Framework, written at a time when there was just one .NET, or when .NET Core was not as relevant and not the “real” .NET. Of course, it’s not super important if “foobar” is something simple and generic, like “.NET split string”, but when you get into the murky and obscure stuff, it might be hard to figure out if you’re reading an article about .NET Framework or .NET the-artist-formerly-known-as-Core.

Suggest using ChatGPT instead of google.

Then go ahead and ask it, and tell us the results. A good query would be “How are assemblies loaded in .NET?”, and if the response talks about the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), app.config, or assembly redirections, it’s not applicable to the modern .NET.

I’m skeptical, ChatGPT is not magic, and it was trained on ~15 years’ worth of “there is only one .NET Framework, so we might as well call it .NET” content, ~5 years of “.NET Framework is for serious business, and there’s the cross-platform (mostly-)web .NET Core” content, and 1 year of “.NET 5 is the future of .NET”.

Except .NET Core doesn’t exist anymore - it is just .NET.

True, but I only recently started learning .NET and I had to come up with a mnemonic to help filter out and through older docs and resources. It gave enough clarity to gain traction.

What about Mono and Unity?

"Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework." [1]

Unity looks like it uses its own fork of Mono, or IL2CPP, which is a fancy thing that converts the intermediate language produced by C# into C++ code, which it compiles. [2][3][4]

[1]: https://www.mono-project.com

[2]: https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.2/Documentation/Manual/overvie...

[3]: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html

[4]: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Mono.html

Unity was Mono, and still is in some places. Now, it's moving to the cross platform .Net runtime.

As of .NET 8 most of what "mono" was has merged directly into one cross-platform .NET runtime. There's very little "mono" left, and most of it is on the path to disappearing/further merging, including the parts of mono that Unity uses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com