What is .Net Core?

.NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications.

This is promised run to on any major operating system, Windows, OSX and Linux! (no costly licensing!)

NET Core is a new cross-platform .NET product. The primary selling points of .NET Core are:

• Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Flexible deployment: Can be included in your app or installed side-by-side user- or machine-wide.
• Command-line tools: All product scenarios can be exercised at the command-line.
• Compatible: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library
• Open source: The .NET Core platform is open source, using MIT and Apache 2 licenses. Documentation is licensed under CC-BY. .NET Core is a .NET Foundation project.
• Supported by Microsoft: .NET Core is supported by Microsoft, per .NET Core Support

Composition

.NET Core is composed of the following parts:

• A .NET runtime, which provides a type system, assembly loading, a garbage collector, native interop and other basic services.
• A set of framework libraries, which provide primitive data types, app composition types and fundamental utilities.
• A set of SDK tools and language compilers that enable the base developer experience, available in the .NET Core SDK.
• The ‘dotnet’ app host, which is used to launch .NET Core apps. It selects and hosts the runtime, provides an assembly loading policy and launches the app. The same host is also used to launch SDK tools in the same way.

Distributions

There are two main distributions for .NET Core:

• .NET Core – Includes the .NET Core runtime and framework. The current version is “.NET Core 1.0”
• .NET Core SDK – Includes .NET Core and the .NET Core Tools. The current version is “.NET Core SDK 1.0 Preview 2”.

(credit to Rich Lander MSFT)

How to Run .Net Core Apps?

Before we dive into the development process, we need to setup our environment first and make sure .NET Core is installed properly.

For Windows

• Install .NET Core SDK

If you have already installed .NET Core before, it is required to remove any previous installation to avoid conflicts or issues. You can do this by going to the Add/Remove Programs.

Install the following Windows Dependencies:

Windows 10 - Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015

If you are a Visual Studio User, you can download the new Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 then download the official .NET Core for Visual Studio official MSI Installer. If you don’t have Visual Studio already, you can download the free/community version of Visual Studio 2015.

• Once installed, you can initialize a sample Hello World Application.
  • Open the command prompt (administrator level)
  • Go to your preferred directory to initialize the sample application:

In my case, I’m in Drive D, DotNetCore folder

• Type mkdir hwapp

This will create a new folder inside named hwapp

• Type cd hwapp

This will move our currently directory inside hwapp

• Type dotnet new

This will create a new C# project

• Run the App
• Type dotnet restore

This command will restore the packages specified in the project.json file.

• Type dotnet run

This command will run the actual sample application.

• For other operating system you can refer to the official. NetCore site (https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#windows)

 
For our next blog, we will discuss ASP.Net Core using Visual Studio 2015 yay!