.NET Core 2.1 Released

Good news: Microsoft just announced .NET Core 2.1 SDK. Let's understand what changes.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I've using the NET Core 2.1.0 RC 1 SDK for a couple of days already because I'm testing some SignalR.Core functionalities available initially for that revision and am very happy to know that the final is here.

Long-term Support

Microsoft also announced that this is a Long-term Support (LTS) version. What does that mean?

• supported for three years
• security improvements
• added platform support 
• superior performance
• improved reliability
• much easier to manage .NET Core and ASP.NET Core versions in project files and with self-contained application publishing.

Features

The most important features IMHO are listed below.

Performance and Reliability Improvements

As previously mentioned, there were significant gains related to performance on this version.

Improved Platform Support

Windows, Mac, Linux and Docker. There's a .net core version for everyone. The list keeps growing!

SignalR.Core

As I mentioned above, yes, the new SignalR.Core is finally available with this release. That's awesome news for those who are using this library and were waiting for that upgrade!

Razor Class Libraries

We can now embbed Razor in class libraries so Razor is used in your backend to build views and pages into reusable class libraries.

.NET Core Tools

This is a very important feature. Existing already in NPM, it basically allows us to install global applications from nuget packages. .NET Core tools run on all .NET Core supported operating system and chip architecture by default, with one set of binaries. Installing and using .NET Core tools is as simple as:

dotnet tool install -g dotnetsay
dotnetsay

The following existing DotNetCliReferenceTool tools have been converted to in-box tools.

• dotnet watch
• dotnet dev-certs
• dotnet user-secrets
• dotnet sql-cache
• dotnet ef

Build Performance Improvements

Builds are faster on .Net Core 2.1. Here's a comparison from Microsoft:

Source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/30/announcing-net-core-2-1/

Docker Support 

Updated Docker images for .NET Core 2.1 are available at microsoft/dotnet on Docker Hub and contain many improvements and simplifications from Microsoft.

See Also

• Why use .NET Core
• Package Management in .NET Core
• Configuration in .NET Core console applications
• How to create a Ubuntu Desktop on Azure
• How to Build and Run ASP.NET Core apps on Linux
• Exporting HTML to PDF using only JavaScript
• Importing CSVs with .Net Core and C#
• Exporting a CSV generated in-memory in Asp.Net with C#
• Generating ASP.NET views in the backend

For more posts about .NET Core, please click here.