Microsoft has introduced the unified .NET 5 platform with support for Linux and Android

Microsoft announced, which will be released after .NET Core 3.0, ensuring support for Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, and WebAssembly in addition to Windows. Also has been published the fifth preview release of the open platform .NET Core 3.0, whose functionality approaches that of .NET Framework 4.8 thanks to the inclusion of open-source Windows Forms, WPF, and Entity Framework 6 components last year. The .NET Framework product will no longer be developed and will stop at version 4.8. All related .NET platform development is now focused on .NET Core, including Runtime, JIT, AOT, GC, BCL (Base Class Library), C#, VB.NET, F#, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, ML.NET, WinForms, WPF, and Xamarin.

The .NET 5 branch marks the unification of .NET Framework, .NET Core, as well as the Xamarin and Mono projects. Within .NET 5, users will be offered a single open framework and runtime that can be used across various areas of development. .NET 5 will allow developers to build products for different platforms (for example, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android) based on a single codebase, using a unified build process irrespective of the application type.

For iOS and Android, a runtime developed as part of the Mono project will be offered. In addition to JIT compilation, a pre-compilation mode into machine code or WebAssembly bytecode based on LLVM will be provided (Mono AOT and Blazor). Enhanced portability with Java, Objective-C, and Swift is also mentioned. The release of .NET 5 is scheduled for November 2020, and .NET Core 3.0 for September this year.

Additionally, Microsoft is also released open cross-platform framework .NET ML 1.0 for developing machine learning systems in C# and F#. The framework code has been published under the MIT license. Official development is supported for Linux, Windows, and macOS. .NET ML can be used as an extension over platforms like TensorFlow, ONNX, and Infer.NET, providing access to various machine learning application scenarios such as image classification, text analysis, predicting performance metrics, ranking, anomaly detection, recommendation generation, and object recognition. The framework is already utilized in many Microsoft products, including Windows Defender, Microsoft Office (design generator in PowerPoint and the recommendation system in Excel Chart), Azure, and PowerBI.

Source: opennet.ru