.NET Standard 2.1

.NET Core is the open source, cross-platform, and fast-moving version of .NET. Because of its side-by-side nature it can take changes that we can’t risk applying back to .NET Framework. This means that .NET Core will get new APIs and language features over time that .NET Framework cannot. At Build we showed a demo how the file APIs are faster on .NET Core. If we put those same changes into .NET Framework we could break existing applications, and we don’t want to do that.

The .NET Standard specification is a standardized set of APIs. The specification is maintained by .NET implementors, specifically Microsoft (includes .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Mono) and Unity. A public feedback process is used as part of establishing new .NET Standard versions through GitHub.

Since Microsoft shipped .NET Standard 2.0 about a year ago,  it’s time to update the standard to include some of the new concepts as well as a number of small improvements that make your life easier across the various implementations of .NET.

In total, about 3k APIs are planned to be added in .NET Standard 2.1. A good chunk of them are brand-new APIs while others are existing APIs that we added to the standard in order to converge the .NET implementations even further.

Announcement details are available at https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/planning/netstandard-2.1/README.md