.NET is a FREE, Open Source developer platform for building all kinds of applications. Anything from web to mobile apps can be built on a Mac, Linux and yes Windows.
Disect that statement a bit...
-
Open Source - look at https://github.com/dotnet for all of the repositories related to .NET. Each represents a part of the platform. Some highlighted repos are:
- docs which can be viewed at https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet
- CLI - .NET Command Line tools
- CoreCLR - .NET Core runtime, base library, containing the garbage collector and base type.
- ASP.NET - ASP.NET and Entity Framework projects. Docs available at https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnetcore, SignalR, Mvc, EntityFramework, KestrelHttpServer
Cross Platform - regardless of what OS you prefer to develop on; the .NET Core SDK and tools can be installed in a manner you like to develop. If its using a CLI experience, text editor such as Visual Studio Code or full IDE with Visual Studio on Windows or MacOS with Visual Studio for Mac; .NET Core is available in any of these situations.
What if you just want to try it out?
No installing anything...
Head over to the in browser tutorial
Getting the bits
Head over to https://dot.net and click the Download link to get the SDK relative your OS.
Another option is to install Visual Studio 2017, .NET Core is installed as a part of the ASP.NET and web development workload.
Creating a quick app using the CLI
Open you favorite command prompt (bash, zsh, powershell, etc) and type dotnet new to see the available project templates.
Create a new web application called devto
dotnet new web --name devto
The output shows the application was created and dependency packages were restored.
The template "ASP.NET Core Empty" was created successfully.
This template contains technologies from parties other than Microsoft, see https://aka.ms/template-3pn for details.
Processing post-creation actions...
Running 'dotnet restore' on devto/devto.csproj...
Restoring packages for /mnt/c/Users/shboyer/play/devto/devto.csproj...
Generating MSBuild file /mnt/c/Users/shboyer/play/devto/obj/devto.csproj.nuget.g.props.
Generating MSBuild file /mnt/c/Users/shboyer/play/devto/obj/devto.csproj.nuget.g.targets.
Restore completed in 3.26 sec for /mnt/c/Users/shboyer/play/devto/devto.csproj.
Restore succeeded.
Now cd into the folder and run the web application.
cd devto
dotnet run
Browse to http://localhost:5000 on your machine and you've now created your first .NET Core web app using just the command line. No huge installation of an IDE and on any OS of your choosing.
Resources
Check out all of the open source docs for ASP.NET Core and .NET Core at https://docs.microsoft.com/.
Any questions please reach out to me on twitter @spboyer
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