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- Documentation
- Video Series on .NET Standard
- Introducing .NET Standard blog post
- Channel 9: Whiteboarding .NET Standard
- Podcast Episode on .NET Rocks!
- Q&A video
.NET Standard is a specification that represents a set of APIs that all .NET platforms have to implement. This unifies the .NET platforms and prevents future fragmentation. Think of .NET Standard as POSIX for .NET.
Having a standard solves the code sharing problem for .NET developers by bringing all the APIs that you expect and love across the environments that you need: desktop applications, mobile apps & games, and cloud services.
For more details, take a look at Introducing .NET Standard blog post.
The general idea of .NET Standard is pretty simple indeed. The blog post is a bit longer because it also provides more context in related areas, specifically how we use .NET Standard in tooling, which additions we're making in .NET Standard 2.0, how we model platform specific APIs, and what .NET Standard means for .NET Core.
David Fowler provided a developer analogy that explains .NET Standard in terms of interfaces and classes.
Here is the difference:
- .NET Standard is a specification that covers which APIs a .NET platform has to implement.
- .NET Core is a concrete .NET platform and implements the .NET Standard.
We have a version document that points you to the platform support matrix as well as which APIs are available in a given .NET Standard version.
When choosing a .NET Standard version you should consider this trade-off:
- The higher the version, the more APIs are available to you.
- The lower the version, the more platforms you can run on.
So generally speaking, you should target the lowest version you get away with. The version document will help inform your decision.
Think of the .NET Standard versions as concentric circles: higher versions incorporate all APIs from previous versions.
From a project that targets .NET Standard version x you'll be able to reference other libraries and NuGet packages that reference .NET Standard from 1.0 up to, and including, version X. For example, when you target .NET Standard 1.6, you'll be able to use packages that are targeting any version from .NET Standard 1.0 up to 1.6. However, you'll not be able to use a package that is targeting a higher version, for example, .NET Standard 2.0.
From a project that is targeting a specific .NET platform, the .NET Standard versions you can reference depends on which version of .NET Standard the platform is implementing.
Starting with .NET Standard 2.0 we also enable referencing binaries compiled for .NET Framework through a compat shim.
Certain PCL profiles are mapped to .NET Standard versions. The mapping can be found in our documentation.
For profiles that have a mapping, these two library types will be able to reference each other.
Based on community feedback, we decided not to make .NET Standard 2.0 be a breaking change from 1.x. Instead, .NET Standard 2.0 is a strict superset of .NET Standard 1.6. The plan for handling .NET Framework 4.6.1 and .NET Standard 2.0 is outlined in the spec.
We think .NET Standard 2.0 is such a large change that bumping the major version is justified:
- We more than doubled the API surface
- We added a compat shim that allows referencing existing binaries, even if they weren't built against .NET Standard or Portable Class Libraries
| Version | #APIs | Growth % |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 7,949 | |
| 1.1 | 10,239 | +29% |
| 1.2 | 10,285 | +0% |
| 1.3 | 13,122 | +28% |
| 1.4 | 13,140 | +0% |
| 1.5 | 13,355 | +2% |
| 1.6 | 13,501 | +1% |
| 2.0 | 32,638 | +142% |
Yes. A specific version of .NET Standard remains frozen once shipped. New APIs will first become available in specific .NET platforms, such as .NET Core. If we believe the new APIs should be made available everywhere, we'll create a new .NET Standard version.
- A library targets a specific framework. .NET Standard is a synthetic framework, which represents a standardized set of APIs across all .NET platforms. A library can also target a specific .NET platform, in which case it gets access to platform-specific APIs. For example, when targeting Xamarin.iOS you also get access to iOS APIs.
- A .NET platform implements a specific .NET Standard version.
- A .NET platform supports all .NET Standard versions that are equal to or lower than the version it implements. For instance, if a .NET platform implements .NET Standard 1.5, it supports 1.0 - 1.5. If it implements .NET Standard 2.0, it supports 1.0 - 2.0.
There is nothing language specific about .NET Standard. From a language view
point, the only tie-in to .NET Standard are the language-specific runtime APIs
(for example Microsoft.CSharp, Microsoft.VisualBasic, FSharp.Core etc.) and
the project templates that allow you to target .NET Standard.
We don't plan to add any language-specific runtime APIs to .NET Standard. The expectation is that they sit on top of .NET Standard and are referenced as needed, for example, from the project template.
The current versions of .NET Standard (1.x - 2.0) were mostly computed:
- The 1.x version range was effectively constraint by what was available in .NET Core.
- For 2.0, we've started with the intersection of .NET Framework and Xamarin, deliberately excluding .NET Core to make sure the resulting set isn't held back by it. We decided we'll simply add the delta to .NET Core.
So for the most part, the decision maker was Microsoft, although as explained above, with very little degrees of freedom as the problem was mostly a result of what was feasible at the time.
Moving forward, we want to open up .NET Standard to be driven by the .NET Standard review board. The board is comprised of implementers of .NET.
The idea being that the standard doesn't drive new APIs: rather, the work of the standard body is to decide which of the APIs available on some .NET platforms should be available on all .NET platform and thus be added to the standard. In other words, the innovation happens in the context of a particular .NET platform and standardization follows afterwards.
The AppDomain type is part of .NET Standard. Not all platforms will support
the creation of new app domains, for example, .NET Core will not, so the method
AppDomain.CreateDomain while being available in .NET Standard might throw
PlatformNotSupportedException.
The primary reason we expose this type in .NET Standard is because the usage is fairly high and typically not associated with creating new app domains but for interacting with the current app domain, such as registering an unhandled exception handler or asking for the application's base directory.
We don't plan to add remoting support to .NET Standard. However, in order to
avoid potential breaking changes, we'll have the MarshalByRefObject type as
many other types derive from it but we will not expose any remoting-specific
members on it, such as CreateObjRef.
.NET Standard will contain the abstractions (DbProvider,
DbProviderFactories, DbConnection, IDbConnection etc.) as well as the
general ADO.NET facilities (DataSet, DataTable etc.) APIs.
We don't plan on adding any specific providers to .NET Standard as their applicability varies (for example, it's a highly unlikely scenario to use the SQL Server client from an iOS device, but it would make sense to use a provider that can store data on the device, such as SQLite). The expectation is that those sit on top of .NET Standard or remain platform-specific.
Today, one of the most popular libraries for dealing with JSON is JSON.NET. But by adding it to the .NET Standard we'd do the community a disservice. What matters is that the JSON support is widely available. And James, the author of JSON.NET, does a great job making sure that JSON.NET is available everywhere. His ability to do this successfully is a function of how hard it is for him to make changes. The best way to do this is by creating a library that targets .NET Standard because it can be updated independently from the standard itself and everyone immediately benefits.
Of course, this doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't provide some built-in JSON support. We've talked with James about this in the past and I believe there is a lot of opportunity for us to collaborate with him on an even more performant way to provide JSON support in .NET. However, we're very interested in doing this with him rather than just building "another" JSON.NET. We want a strong ecosystem for .NET, but this can only happen if we embrace libraries based on merit, rather than by who wrote it. That's what open source is all about.
As explained in the JSON.NET example above, there is a trade-off between adding components to .NET Standard and having components that are on top of .NET Standard and can be updated independently.
Check out the .NET Standard inclusion principles to see how we approach this.
We generally don't include APIs in .NET Standard that don't work everywhere, and instead provide them as libraries that sit above .NET Standard.
But if you think about it: we can't make type members (for example, methods,
properties, etc.) additive. The only thing you can make additive are types, as
two different types can live in separate assemblies but we don't have a
mechanism to split a single type across two different assemblies. In those
cases, we leave the members on the type and let platforms that cannot
meaningfully implement them throw PlatformNotSupportedException.
Moving forward, we try to avoid creating types where only parts of it work everywhere. But as always, there will be cases where we couldn't predict the future and are forced to throw.
Our current focus is on providing APIs either as part of .NET Standard or as
independent packages that sit on top of .NET Standard. In some cases, certain
APIs will not be supported everywhere and throw PlatformNotSupportedException.
While that isn't ideal, it's much simpler than the alternatives, which are:
- Using
#if, also called cross-compiling - Write complicated reflection code, also called runtime light-up
A simple if statement with a platform check is much easier to express. Of
course, there are limits to this. Exceptions are only acceptable for corner
cases to avoid the complexities above. We will generally not expose large set of
APIs that aren't supported.
In the future, my hope is that we can provide tooling to help you with this, by, for example, providing Roslyn analyzers that can give you squiggles in the IDE.
Yes. We're working with Unity to make sure this is a smooth experience. In general, since Unity is a fork of Mono it will mostly get .NET Standard support for free. The work to support Unity is mostly in tooling.
It's a Garmin Forerunner 920, a triathlon watch. Sadly, my watch is fitter than I am :-)
The upcoming version of Visual Studio ("Dev15") will support the creation of .NET Standard Libraries, including building NuGet packages.
The upcoming version of Xamarin Studio will support this.
These were terms we used in earlier discussions. We only have one concept today called .NET Standard.
Yes. For now, take a look at the .NET Standard 2.0 spec, as it has some diagrams.