Microsoft announced release of ASP.NET Core RC2 and .NET Core SDK Preview 1

Microsoft made an announcement for the release of its next generation version of the NET platform - Release Candidate 2 (RC2) of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. Since the release of RC1 last November, Microsoft ASP.Net developers will get this biggest update of RC2. According to Microsoft, this can be used to build ASP.NET core, class libraries and console apps for Linux, Windows and OS X. 

With all new version of RC2, users will find major improvements, including new command-line tools for .NET Core is known as .NET CLI (Command Line Interface), new APIs, reliability and performance improvements. Also, DNX (.NET Execution Environment) tools are removed in this new version.

The .NET Core SDK Preview 1 is available for download on Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. Also, the user can use it with the Docker.

Release

The latest release has got three major components: .NET Core RC2, ASP.NET Core RC2 (formerly known as ASP.NET 5) and .NET Core RC2 SDK Preview 1. The changes arrived in ASP.NET Core are Visual Studio that has got full debugging support and support for authorization and authentication by using the Active Directory in both the Azure and on-premises.

Supported platforms

It will now support more operating systems, including –

• Debian 8.2+ 
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 
• Ubuntu 14.04 
• Centos 7.1 
• Linux Mint 17+ 
• Mac 
• Windows 

.NET Core deployment options

With the Microsoft latest release, ASP.NET developers will be introduced with following the new deployment options.

• Portable apps: User will be able to deploy apps that rely on a shared installation of .NET Core version that will enable it to work similar to previous .NET Framework. 
• Self-contained apps: This type of apps have no .NET core dependency. They include both application code and runtime, and required to compile particularly for the targeted platform. 

Additionally, the API in .NET Core RC2 faces two more changes, including the System.Drawing to support graphics and implementation of System.Data namespace for database applications.

.NET Standard Library

This .NET Standard Library is released for the very first time, which basically represents APIs that are available in all .NET implementations. This .NET Standard Library can be considered as the next version of Portable Class Libraries, however, the process of creating the libraries and the availability of the APIs set will be very much different. The user will experience more APIs and support for .NET platform with each .NET standard versions.

.NET Core Tools Telemetry

There is another new telemetry feature available which collects usage information about the .NET Core Tools that will allow Microsoft to make improvisation if required. The data collected are the framework and commands used and the versions.

The user may any time opt-out from this telemetry feature by setting DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable.