Getting started with .NET

A bit of history; the team did a magnificent job building ASP.NET Core from the ground up, cutting out compatibility with older versions. That brought its share of problems at first, but those interoperability issues got alleviated by the creation of .NET Standards. Now, with the reunification of most technologies into .NET 5 and the promise of a shared BCL, the name ASP.NET Core is (almost) no more, but became the future. Afterward, Microsoft is planning a major release of .NET every year, so 2021 should be .NET 6, and so on.

The good thing is that architectural principles and design patterns should remain relevant in the future and are not tightly coupled with the versions of .NET you are using. Minor changes to the code sample should be enough to migrate the knowledge and the code to the new versions.

Now, let's cover some key information surrounding .NET 5 and the .NET ecosystem.

.NET SDK versus runtime

You can install different binaries...