Developers Use Case For .NET API Browser

Abstract

Many times, developers need to know, if a technology or a feature is supported by a specific .NET version. For example, how to verify that .NET Core has Linux support or not. Well, you can always Bing that but wouldn’t it be better, if this need is supported by “one stop search” and the results were authentic.

Accessing .NET API Browser

.NET API Browser can be accessed by https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/



.NET API Browser allows you to search a wide range of features across the following.

• .NET Framework
• .NET Standard
• .NET Core
• Xamarin
• Azure

Let’s search in .NET Framework

Open API Browser and filter it to .NET Framework and choose a version from the middle dropdown.
.NET Framework allows to search only for .NET 4.5 – 4.7 I.e. you can’t search features prior to .NET 4.5 in .NET API Browser.

With the release of .NET 4.6, a new overload was introduced for System.GC.Collect(). When Searched in .NET 4.5, you will see, as shown below.

When we switched the Framework Version to 4.6; then the new overload can be observed, as shown below.

Let’s Search in .NET Standard

.NET Standard is a specification of .NET API, which is available across all .NET Runtimes. .NET Standards provides and supports uniformity within the entire .NET ecosystem. You can refer to the list of .NET Standard libraries at https://www.nuget.org/packages/NETStandard.Library

As the name explains by it-self; this becomes evident that all the core APIs like System, System.Collections, System.Diagnostics and System.IO etc. are the natural candidates for .NET Standard, as shown below.

Let’s search in .NET Core

.NET Core is a brand new and well accepted framework in Microsoft and non-Microsoft world. 

A well-known fact about .NET Core is that .NET Core has support for Linux, as shown below.

Summary

.NET API Browser is a great feature and can become very handy to identify supported features by the various platforms, as shown above. You may want to use .NET API Browser to search and learn about other APIs related to Xamarin and Azure as well. Remember, it’s a one stop .NET API Browser.