Today, we’re announcing .NET Core 2.1 Release Candidate 1 (RC 1). The .NET Core 2.1 RC 1 is now ready for broad testing and for production use. Our quality, reliability, and performance testing give us confidence that the release is ready for the first set of production users. On the metrics that we can measure, .NET Core 2.1 is a large step forward from .NET Core 2.0.
ASP.NET Core 2.1 RC 1 and Entity Framework 2.1 RC 1 are also releasing today.
You can download and get started with .NET Core 2.1 RC 1, on Windows, macOS, and Linux: •.NET Core 2.1 RC 1 SDK (includes the runtime) •.NET Core 2.1 RC 1 Runtime
You can see complete details of the release in the .NET Core 2.1 RC 1 release notes. Related instructions, known issues, and workarounds are included in releases notes. Please report any issues you find in the comments or at dotnet/core #1506
You can develop .NET Core 2.1 apps with Visual Studio 2017 15.7, Visual Studio for Mac 7.5, or Visual Studio Code.
At this point in the release, the feature set and performance characteristics are not changing much. Look at Announcing .NET Core 2.1 Preview 2 and Performance Improvements in .NET Core 2.1 to learn about improvements in the release that are not covered in this post.