.NET Core Journey

Couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced .NET Core 3 Preview 1, which is the first public release of .NET Core 3. Let us scan the journey of .NET Core

.NET Core 1
The .NET Core journey began a few years ago, with version 1 in 2016, with the goal of building the first version of .NET that was open source and cross-platform (Windows, macOS and Linux).

Version 1 shipped with new versions of ASP.NET and Entity Framework (EF) and primarily targeted Web applications.

.NET Core 2
While version 1 got .NET running on new platforms, it supported only a limited set of .NET APIs. In order to address this, we created .NET Standard, which specified the APIs that any .NET runtime must implement so that code and binaries can be shared across .NET platforms and versions.

With .NET Standard 2.0, we added more than 20,000 APIs to the .NET Standard spec,  .NET Core 2 also continued the push to make .NET one of the fastest full-stack frameworks.
 
.NET Core 3.0
.NET Core 3.0 is the next major version of the .NET Core platform. It includes many exciting new features, such as support for Windows desktop applications with Windows Forms (WinForms), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Entity Framework 6. For Web development it adds support for building client-side Web applications with C# using Razor Components (formerly known as Blazor). And it includes support for C# 8.0 and .NET Standard 2.1.

.NET Core 3.0 will also fully support ML.NET, our open source machine learning framework built for .NET developers, along with support for Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios.

You can see complete details of the release in the .NET Core 3 Preview 1 release notes at https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/release-notes/3.0/preview/3.0.0-preview1.md