The new ASP.NET and the .NET Framework that it relies upon were rewritten to be open source and cross-platform in Core version 1. The packages were also split up, which although done with admirable intentions has caused confusion. ASP.NET Core 2 is now included in the .NET Core 2 installation package along with Entity Framework Core. This means that you no longer need to ship the ASP.NET Core framework with your app when you deploy. The project known as .NET Native has been postponed (outside of UWP) and will hopefully arrive within the next year.
All these different names can be perplexing, but naming things is hard. A humorous variation of Phil Karlton's famous quote goes like this:
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."
We've looked at naming here, and we'll get to caching later on in this book.
It can be a little confusing understanding how all of these versions fit together. This is best explained with...