Finally, the .NET Standard 2.0 is final. Microsoft has announced this via
GitHub and said that users can now start building .NET Standard 2.0 libraries as well as NuGet packages, however, the company has suggested to use .NET Core Preview 2 because it incorporates several necessary improvements for a better experience.
As per the blog, .NET Standard 2.0 offers the following extraordinary features-
“Bigger API Surface:
We have more than doubled the set of available APIs from 13k in .NET Standard 1.6 to 32k in .NET Standard 2.0. Most of the added APIs are .NET Framework APIs. These additions make it much easier to port existing code to .NET Standard, and, by extension, to any .NET implementation of .NET Standard, such as .NET Core 2.0 and the upcoming version of UWP.
.NET Framework compatibility mode:
The vast majority of NuGet packages are currently still targeting .NET Framework. Many projects are currently blocked from moving to .NET Standard because not all their dependencies are targeting .NET Standard yet. That's why we added a compatibility mode that allows .NET Standard projects to depend on .NET Framework libraries as if they were compiled for .NET Standard. Of course, this may not work in all cases (for instance, if the .NET Framework binaries uses WPF), but we found that 70% of all NuGet packages on nuget.org are API compatible with .NET Standard 2.0, so in practice, it unblocks many projects.
Broad platform support
.NET Standard 2.0 is supported on the following platforms:
- .NET Framework 4.6.1
- .NET Core 2.0
- Mono 5.4
- Xamarin.iOS 10.14
- Xamarin.Mac 3.8
- Xamarin.Android 7.5
- UWP is work in progress and will ship later this year.”
Along with this, the company has also told about the prerequisite tools for using .NET Standard 2.0. You need to run the latest versions of the following tools -
.NET Core SDK - For this, Microsoft suggests to install .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2. This includes CLI also. So, for users who are willing to use only CLI, this one tool is sufficient to work with.
Visual Studio - Users who want to write their .NET Standard 2.0 libraries using VS, they need to install Visual Studio 2017 15.3 which is the latest version of Visual Studio. For Mac users, however, the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac will work perfectly.