What .Net 5 Holds for Web Developers

.Net 5 is created to make the entire .Net framework universal i.e. easily accessible and compatible with every platform beyond just Windows. This project aims to improve .Net in many ways. .Net 5 is just one .Net going forward from now on that will be usable for MacOS, Linux, TvOS, iOS, Andorid, WatchOS, Web Assembly and many more. In simple words, .Net is your go to option for every kind of web development.

.Net 5 is embedded with the best features of the .Net Framework, .Net Core, Mono, and Xamarin. It is meant to provide APIs, libraries, and run-time to create apps for Web, Windows, Mobile & IoT devices. The main goal of .Net 5 is to empower unified .Net Client Application projects to be easily accessible and working on various platforms including Windows, UNIX, Linux, Legacy Windows, iOS, Driod, HTML5, and Macintosh.

Aim of improving .Net 5:

• To produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere with standard runtime behaviors and developer experiences
• To widen the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono
• Deliver a unique solution out of a single code-base that can be expanded and improved in all environments
• .NET 5 hast the capability to make your code and project files look and feel the same irrespective of the type of app you are building
• The .Net developers will have access to the same runtime, API and language capabilities with each app

The below features will continue to exist:

• Open source and community-oriented on GitHub
• Cross-platform implementation
• Support for leveraging platform-specific capabilities
• High performance
• Side-by-side installation
• Small project files
• Capable command-line interface
• Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code integration

Features exclusively for .NET developers

• Presence of Java interoperability across platforms
• Support Swift and objective C interoperability across platforms
• Support of CoreFx for .Net static compilation

All in all .Net 5 is here to feature latest APIs, Desktop development, mobile app development, runtime capabilities and more.

A unified platform for .Net 5:

Source: Microsoft.com

Let’s discuss these developments in detail:

1. Desktop Development with .Net 5

Microsoft has accessed Windows Desktop Packs to support desktop apps only for Windows. Now, the launch of .Net 5 has come up with all the major desktop development functionalities and libraries. The migration of Windows desktop app into .Net does not pose any impact on the .Net Core architecture but adds some additional benefits including Core Runtime & API Performance enhancement, and deployment flexibility. .Net 5 also supports some major sub-framework for desktop development like Entity Framework, GDI+, LINQ, and ADO.Net.

2. Mobile Development with .Net 5

Another great feature of new .Net 5 is to provide support for robust mobile application development. It will provide the feature to continue building cross-platform mobile apps for Android, iOS, tvOS, macOS, and watchOS platforms using Xamarin.

3. Cloud Development with .NET 5

Azure app development is one of the most fascinating features among the major functionalities of .Net 5. As cloud development has gained a lot of importance therefore, with the release of the latest version of .Net, developers will continue to develop software with Azure. Azure Cloud development comprises of exclusive combination of tools and frameworks, including Web API, ASP.Net, Serverless computing, Azure databases, Docker containers, microservices, DevOps and more.

4. Game Development with .Net 5

.Net 5 and Visual Studio 2019 have come together to create an important part of .Net gaming. This combination will be widely used to develop games for mobile, Xbox and other gaming platforms.

5. Runtime and Language with .Net 5

It offers .NET developers with two option of runtimes they want to choose for development. CoreCLR or Mono, developers can choose any of these. CoreCLR is the .Net core runtime used for Windows desktop, IOT, machine learning, and Cloud applications.

Whereas Mono is a well-known cross-platform. .Net implementation. Both Mono and CoreCLR include many similarities and some valuable unique capabilities. .Net 5 also comes with AOT and JIT compilers adding their own benefits in making the development easier and faster.

What .Net 5 promises- (in a nutshell)

Learning and reading all the benefits, specifications, modifications in the .Net platform has given an idea that this new version is definitely one for all technology. In a nutshell .Net 5 is what developers yearned for all this time to create robust web applications across platforms.

Long term specifications for .NET 5 include the availability of a unified .NET SDK experience, with a single BCL (base class library) across all .NET 5 applications.

A single .NET 5 native application project is designed to support all platforms such as Windows, Microsoft Duo (Android), and Apple iOS using native controls on those platforms.

Additional goals include support for building high-performance cloud applications as already discussed above, faster algorithms in the BCL, better support for containers in the runtime, and support for HTTP3. .NET 5.0 includes support for the Web Assembly binary format, via the Mono runtime and .NET libraries

Besides all these features, .NET 5 also promises developers to automatically find the bugs and debug them.

In the end…

This latest version of .Net has covered almost all the aspects a good platform should have. .Net 5 can be called the biggest version of .Net Microsoft has ever released. Although, many more updates are being worked upon and will be released in future, till then .Net 5 will prove to be a better option in the world of web development.