Updated (2017): See .NET Core Releases to learn about newer releases.

This post was written by Scott Hunter.

You all want .NET Core 1.0 RC2, you want a schedule, and you want to go live. Today we’ve got a schedule to share plus some changes that will improve things for everyone in the .NET Community going forward.

The Core Schedule

• .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 runtime and libraries will be available in mid-May.
  • Tooling will be Preview 1 and bundled with this release.
• .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM (release) runtime and libraries will be available by the end of June.
  • Tooling will be Preview 2 and bundled with this release.
• We will continue to make changes and stabilize the tooling until it RTMs with Visual Studio “15”.

How We Got Here

The ASP.NET team started two and a half years ago, building a new version of ASP.NET that was modular, cross platform, and high-performance. This new version of ASP.NET was built on a new .NET Execution Environment (DNX) that was optimized for modern cloud-focused workloads (websites, microservices, etc.). We shipped an RC1 of those bits in November.

After shipping ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC1, it was very important to broaden .NET Core to also support building native console applications. So we started the process of reworking the tool chain so it could be used to build .NET console, class libraries and server applications. This process has proved to be harder than we anticipated and led to us removing dates for RC2/RTM from our schedule in February.

Unifying the frameworks and the tooling

Now that Xamarin is a part of Microsoft, more than ever we want to make it easy to share code between desktop, server and mobile applications.

We announced the .NET Standard at Build as part of our plan for making it easy to share code across .NET application models.

We also need to make it easy to work with projects across these application models. In order to do this we are working to merge the capabilities of .xproj/project.json and .csproj project systems into a single project system based on MSBuild. This transition will be automatic and will not require you to change your existing projects. This work will happen during the VS 15 release schedule and we will release another blog post with more details.

What does Preview mean?

Remember that .NET Core has two main parts:

• The Runtime/Libraries – This is the CLR, libraries, compilers, etc.
• The Tooling – This is all the support in the .NET Core command line tools, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that enable you to work with .NET Core projects.

We’re splitting the .NET Core “release train” so that those of you who are waiting can go live on .NET Core 1.0 RC2 with confidence, while we continue to deliver on our plans for the tooling:

• The .NET Core 1.0 RC2 runtime is a true Release Candidate. It’s solid, stable, and it won’t change for RTM (except if something critical happens) and we feel good about it. It will have a “go-live” license, meaning you can get official support from Microsoft.
• The tooling that supports .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, including the new command line tools and bits that plug into Visual Studio & Visual Studio Code, aren’t there yet. It’s going to change before it stabilizes. We’re going to call this tooling release Preview 1.

Summary

If you have questions, please share them below and the team will answer them here. We will also discuss this delivery schedule change on our next ASP.NET Community Standup with a full question and answer segment.

Scott Hunter – .NET Team