October 15th, 2019

Announcing .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1

Rich Lander [MSFT]
Program Manager

Today, we’re announcing .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1. .NET Core 3.1 will be a small release focused on key improvements in Blazor and Windows desktop, the two big additions in .NET Core 3.0. It will be a long term support (LTS) release with an expected final ship date of December 2019.

You can download .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1 on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also releasing updates today.

Visual Studio 16.4 Preview 2 and is also releasing today. It is a recommended update to use .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1. Visual Studio 16.4 includes .NET Core 3.1, so just updating Visual Studio will give you both releases.

Details:

Known Issue: The Visual Studio 16.4 installer may uninstall the .NET Core 3.0 Runtime when it installs .NET Core 3.1. We recommend you re-in-install or repair the .NET Core 3.0 SDK in that case.

Improvements

There are several targeted improvements planned for .NET Core 3.1. The following improvements are not available yet, but are expected in later previews.

In .NET Core 3.0, the .NET Core Desktop Runtime Installer (includes WPF and Windows Forms) does not install the .NET Core Runtime (includes CoreFX and CoreCLR) for you. We will be changing that, so that the Desktop Runtime installer is self-sufficient. The Runtime and Hosting Bundle, for server scenarios, already works this way.

C++/CLI was a promised component of the .NET Core 3.0 release. It was delivered, given that it is a required dependency of WPF, but a developer experience in Visual Studio and the SDK was missing. We will be delivering that experience with .NET Core 3.1 and Visual Studio 16.4. C++/CLI is only supported on Windows.

macOS 10.15 Catalina includes a new security requirement, that applications must be notarized. We will be satisfying these requirements for the .NET Core SDK, for .NET Core 3.1 and all other supported .NET Core releases. If you are using .NET Core to deliver macOS applications, we would appreciate working with you on notarization requirements.

Closing

The primary goal of .NET Core 3.1 is to polish the features and scenarios we delivered in .NET Core 3.0. .NET Core 3.1 will be a long term support (LTS) release, supported for at least 3 years.

Please install and test .NET Core 3.1 Preview 1 and give us feedback. It is not yet supported or recommended for use in production.

If you missed it, check out the .NET Core 3.0 announcement from last month.

Category
.NET

Author

Rich Lander [MSFT]
Program Manager

Richard Lander is a Principal Program Manager on the .NET Core team. He works on making .NET Core work great in memory-limited Docker containers, on ARM hardware like the Raspberry Pi, and enabling GPIO programming and IoT scenarios. He is part of the design team that defines new .NET runtime capabilities and features. He enjoys British rock and Doctor Who. He grew up in Canada and New Zealand.

35 comments

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  • Jenny anams

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  • piotr olczyk

    I would like to ask about suport to USB?
    Is the assembly Windows.Devices.HumanInterfaceDevice, which is a part of Windows UWP Namespaces is supported by NET.Core 3.0?

  • Thomas De Wulf

    Well a rare UWP developer in the house here…. 🙂 When will this be supported so I can upgrade my Nuget packages to .NET standard 2.1 in my UWP apps.

  • Nejc Brelih-Wasowski

    Does anyone know if or how is it possible to install the preview version alongside the stable one on linux (Ubuntu)? I installed the preview version into a local folder and did a path and DOTNET_ROOT export but I am still only seeing the stable one. Even when 3.0 was in preview I had to remove 2.x versions for the preview to work.

  • Nilesh Pagare

    Hi Richard,

    *Updating VS to 2019.4 / .5 didn't upgrade the .net Core from 3.0 to 3.1 latest preview as a part of the install

    *I enabled the option in the VS Studio to selecting preview sdk but that didn't show up those packages in the NuGet package manager (solution / project) when this option is selected

    *Are dotnet ef tools updated (functionally and/or version numbers) in 3.1 preview 1 ? If so, how do we upgrade those...

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  • ZippyV

    A bit off-topic but what is the status of System.Text.Formatting?

  • Jason Brower

    I really appreciate all that Microsoft is doing for the .Net Framework. Almost daily I check to see if there is a new Visual Studio preview release out and when I see that it needs to update I am like a child on Christmas waiting to see what comes with the previews of the framework.

    I feel like a brave soul jumping into the latest and greatest each time because my long term project is...

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    • Jon

      I sympathize and this is nothing more than a passing comment from the peanut gallery, but you should try being stuck maintaining web-based apps. WPF is a dream compared to that god-awful development model. (Once, long ago, I was a native desktop app dev…)

  • Marina Sundström

    Regarding C++/CLI and the interop story... With the announcement of .NET 5, Microsoft promised interop with other languages (Java and Python etc). I assume that the the Xlang project will be the basis for that. It is already used by the C++/WinRT projection.

    The project is essentially fulfilling what .NET/CLI was supposed to be - a successor to COM. Cross-platform, of course.

    It is still early but I will follow the project closely!

    https://github.com/microsoft/xlang

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  • Alex Valuiskyi

    Do you plan to support MSBuild 15 csproj files for C++/CLI?

  • Ismail Demir

    Request: I still waiting for a roadmap of VB.Net!

    Question: Compared to applications that written in c++/c# how fast will be vb.net winform applications be opened?

    Is there any internal benchmarks?

    Thank you

    • Kathleen DollardMicrosoft employee

      We honestly do not know yet. My prediction is that it will be the same as most of the code is shared.