What is the outlook for jumping to .NET 5?

It is not just the case that .NET 5 is the latest tech in the Microsoft and open source world. We see that adopting .NET 5 adds a lot of value as well. .NET 5 has many features that are forward-looking, such as not being tied just to the Windows platform, being container-aware, and supporting lots of cloud-native workloads. It has even added the superior support of technologies from .NET Framework, including WinForms, yet .NET 5 still does not support a number of technologies, including WebForms, WCF hosting, and Windows Workflow (WF).

This means that if you are not starting a new application, but instead, are thinking about upgrading your existing applications or services, then it could also be the case that your application depends on some libraries or NuGet packages that are not yet available on .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5. As a strategy, you may look for alternative technologies or wait until the vendor releases the newer versions specifically for .NET 5.

In all such cases, we will dive deeper in the later chapters of this book, where we will focus on the migration topics along with the relevant situations and the example codes that will help you in making better decisions on migration topics.

Tip for WCF and WF applications

Around May 2019, there was a kick-off for two community-based open source software (OSS) projects on GitHub that are intended to bring WCF and WF support to .NET Core.

Check out Scott Hunter's blog post to see where Core WCF and Core WF fits in with the .NET 5 roadmap: Supporting the community with WF and WCF OSS projects:https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/supporting-the-community-with-wf-and-wcf-oss-projects/.

Now that we've understood the history and the advantages of .NET 5, let's check out the type of applications it can create.