Microsoft releases .NET Core 1.0, complete with Red Hat Linux support

Today at the Red Hat Summit, Microsoft announced the launch of .NET Core 1.0. Continuing the company's embrace of other platforms, the latest version of the open source .NET runtime platform supports Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and -- of course -- Linux.

At the summit, Red Hat said that .NET Core 1.0 will be fully supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Microsoft's partnership with Red Hat late last year, and the company's on-going expansion into the cross-platform cloud, Linux support is not entirely surprising. Also announced today was ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework 1.0 for developers to get to work with.

Microsoft says that with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core it is possible to create apps in a matter of minutes. Over on the Red Hat blog, much is made of the fact that Red Hat is "the only commercial Linux distribution to feature full, enterprise-grade support for .NET". The organization says:

Today, we're pleased to announce that .NET Core is now not only available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift via certified containers, but is supported by Red Hat and extended via the integrated hybrid support partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat. This [opens] up platform choice for enterprises seeking to use .NET on a flexible Linux and container-based environments.

The release coincides with the launch of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 which is needed to build .NET Core apps in Visual Studio. But for both Microsoft and Red Hat, it is the impact the release will have on cloud development that is particularly important. Microsoft says:

This is the biggest transformation of .NET since its inception and will define .NET for the next decade. We've rebuilt the foundation of .NET to be targeted at the needs of today’s world: highly distributed cloud applications, micro services and containers.

Moving forward .NET Framework and .NET Core and Xamarin are all important products that will continue to evolve, for Windows, cross-platform cloud and cross-platform mobile, respectively. The .NET Framework and traditional ASP.NET will continue to be relevant for your existing workloads. You can share code and reuse your skills across the entire .NET family so you can decide what to use and when, including mobile apps with Xamarin. And because we designed .NET to share a common library (the .NET standard library) .NET Framework, .NET Core and Xamarin apps will share new common capabilities in the future.

You can watch the announcement video over on Channel 9 and grab .NET Core from http://dot.net/core.

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