A Brief History of .NET Standard
Xamarin (and before that, Mono) allowed .NET code to run on multiple platforms for years. These days, there’s a new push in cross-platform with .NET Core and .NET Standard. This post looks at the history of code sharing in .NET and where cross-platform .NET is going with Core and Standard.
History of .NET Standard
In the early days of the .NET framework, there was little need to share code between applications. When Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was released in 2006, it was a choice between WinForms or WPF, and developers didn’t have to support the same application in both frameworks. Though sharing files was sometimes needed between client and server apps, it was infrequent.
Microsoft then released Silverlight, a smaller, portable framework on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Suddenly, developers were asked to code two versions of the same application: a full-featured version made in WPF to only run in Windows and a smaller version that ran cross-platform in Silverlight. The Silverlight plugin was able to run these apps outside of the browser (OOB) which made it possible to build cross-platform applications. There was even some hope that Silverlight would eventually run on mobile phones. Though this never came to be, the need to have the same code run on multiple platforms became more crucial and more complex.
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