.NET

A free, cross-platform application framework from Microsoft.

.NET is the modern, cross-platform, open-source successor to Microsoft's Windows-only .NET Framework. It supports C#, F#, and Visual Basic, runs natively on Linux, macOS, and Windows on x64, ARM64, and several other architectures, and ships as a single self-contained SDK including compilers, package manager, build system, runtime, and a base class library covering networking, file I/O, cryptography, JSON, and many other domains.

The runtime started life on Windows in 2002 as the original .NET Framework, written largely by Anders Hejlsberg's team after his move from Borland to Microsoft. .NET Core in 2016 was the first fully open-source, cross-platform release; the unified ".NET 5+" generation that began in 2020 dropped the "Core" branding and merged the codebases. .NET releases follow an annual cadence, with even-numbered releases (.NET 6, 8, 10) carrying Long Term Support.

ASP.NET Core powers a substantial share of large enterprise web backends, Unity uses an embedded .NET runtime as its scripting host (running on the IL2CPP cross-compiler in deployed games), and Microsoft itself runs much of its cloud-side software on it. MAUI extends .NET to cross-platform desktop and mobile UIs, gradually replacing the older Xamarin stack for new development.

License: MIT

Category: Language

Website: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install dotnet-sdk-8.0
Arch:          sudo pacman -S dotnet-sdk
macOS:         brew install --cask dotnet-sdk

Authors

Microsoft and the .NET Foundation

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