"CLR" entries

.NET open source

Microsoft .Net Team Program Manager, Beth Massi, on the open source .NET Core.

wire mesh

You might have heard the news that .NET is open source. In this post I’m going to explain what exactly we open sourced, why we did it, and how you can get involved.

Defining .NET

If you’re not familiar with .NET, it’s a managed execution environment that provides a variety of services to its running applications including things like automatic memory management, type safety, native interop, and multiple modern programming languages that make it easier to build all kinds of apps, for nearly any device, quickly. The first version of .NET was initially released in 2002 and quickly picked up steam in many businesses. Today there are over 1.8 billion active installs of the .NET Framework and 6 million .NET developers in the world.

The .NET Framework consists of these major components: the common language runtime (CLR), which is the execution engine that handles running applications; the .NET Framework Base Class Libraries (BCL), which provides a library of tested, reusable code that developers can call from their own applications; and the managed languages and compilers for C#, F#, and Visual Basic. Application models extend the common libraries of the .NET Framework to provide additional libraries that developers can use to build specific types of applications, like web, desktop, mobile device apps, etc. For more information on all the components in .NET 2015 see: Understanding .NET 2015.

There are multiple implementations of .NET, some from Microsoft and others from other companies or open source projects. In this post, I’ll focus on .NET Core from Microsoft.

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