.NET Platform
This document does not assume any prior knowledge of .NET Framework or it's ecosystem, this document will allow you better understanding of what is new and how are things changing.
As any mature and advanced application development framework, .NET has many powerful features . Main Features of .NET runtime are
- Automatic memory management
- Type safety
- Delegates and lambdas
- Generic Types (Generics)
- Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
- Async Programming
- Native interoperability
- Unsafe Code
The .NET Platform is described by a set of open standards ECMA 335 standard. There are multiple implementations of these standards, provided by Microsoft and other companies
.NET Framework
The .NET Framework is Microsoft's primary develop platform for Windows server and client developers. It is a very powerful and mature framework, with a huge class library (known as the .NET Framework Class Library) that supports a wide variety of applications and solutions on Windows.
.NET Core
.NET Core is a subset of .NET framework but a cross-platform implementation of the .NET Platform. ASP.NET Core is the primary workload that runs on .NET Core.So it is Cross-platform and completely open source
Mono
Mono is the original open source and cross-platform implementation of .NET, from the community Mono Project. It is now sponsored by Xamarin It can be thought of as an open and cross-platform version of the .NET Framework. It's APIs follow the progress of the .NET Framework, not .NET Core