Introducing .NET 5

To build Blazor apps, we must use .NET 5. The .NET team has been working hard on tightening everything up for us developers for years. They have been making everything simpler, smaller, cross-platform, and open source – not to mention easier to utilize your existing knowledge of .NET development.

.NET core was a step of the journey toward a more unified .NET. It allowed Microsoft to reenvision the whole .NET platform and build it in a completely new way.

There are three different types of .NET runtimes:

• .NET Framework (full .NET)
• .NET Core
• Mono/Xamarin

Different runtimes had different capabilities and performances. This also meant that creating a .NET core app (for example) had different tooling and frameworks that needed to be installed.

.NET 5 is the start of our journey toward one single .NET. With this unified toolchain, the experience to create, run, and so on will be the same across all the different project types. .NET 5 is still modular in a similar way that we are used to, so we do not have to worry that merging all the different .NET versions is going to result in a bloated .NET.

Thanks to the .NET platform, you will be able to reach all the platforms we talked about at the beginning of this chapter (web, desktop, mobile, games, the cloud (or server side), AI, and even IoT) using only C# and with the same tooling.

Now that you know about some of the surrounding technologies, in the next section, it's time to introduce the main character of this book: Blazor.