Download .Net Core 3.1.0

Microsoft has released .Net Core version 3.1.0. This is a modular one platform for creating web applications and services that run on Linux, macOS and Windows. Of course it uses .Net and you can compare it to Node.js or Go. The whole is released under a mix of MIT, Apache 2 and CC BY 4.0 licenses. This release features the following announcement on the .Net Blog:

Announcing .NET Core 3.1

We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.1. It’s really just a small set of fixes and refinements over .NET Core 3.0, which we released just over two months ago. The most important feature is that .NET Core 3.1 is an long-term supported (LTS) release and will be supported for three years. As we’ve done in the past, we wanted to take our time before releasing the next LTS release. The extra two months (after .NET Core 3.0) allowed us to select and implement the right set of improvements over what was already a very stable base. .NET Core 3.1 is now ready to be used wherever your imagination or business need takes it.

ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also being released today.

Visual Studio 2019 16.4 was also released today and includes .NET Core 3.1. It is a required update to use .NET Core 3.1 with Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2019 users, we recommend simply updating Visual Studio to 16.4 and instead of separately downloading .NET Core 3.1.

Visual Studio for Mac also supports and includes .NET Core 3.1, in the Visual Studio for Mac 8.4 Preview channel. You will need to opt into the Preview channel to use .NET Core 3.1.

Release notes:

• .NET Core 3.1 release notes
• GitHub issue for .NET Core 3.1 issues
• GitHub release

The changes in .NET Core 3.1 were primarily focused on Blazor and Windows Desktop, the two new and large additions in .NET Core 3.0. This includes support for C ++ / CLI, which has been a regular request for developers targeting Windows.

Before we take a look at what’s new in .NET Core 3.1, let’s take a quick look at the key improvements in .NET Core 3.0, which is the bulk of what’s important to consider for .NET Core 3.1.

Recap of .NET Core 3.0 Improvements

The following key improvements were delivered in .NET Core 3.0. We’ve already heard from developers of big sites that it is working super well for them.

• .NET Core 3.0 is already battle-tested by being hosted for months at dot.net and on Bing.com. Many other Microsoft teams will soon be deploying large workloads on .NET Core 3.1 in production.
• Performance is greatly improved across many components and is described in detail at Performance Improvements in .NET Core 3.0 and Hardware Intrinsics in .NET Core.
• C # 8 add async streams, range / index, more patterns, and nullable reference types. Nullable enables you to directly target the flaws in code that lead to NullReferenceException. The lowest layer of the framework libraries has been annotated, so that you know when to expect null.
• F # 4.7 focuses on making some thing easier with implicit yield expressions and some syntax relaxations. It also includes support for LangVersion, and ships with nameof and opening of static classes in preview. The F # Core Library now also targets .NET Standard 2.0. You can read more at Announcing F # 4.7.
• .NET Standard 2.1 increases the set of types you can use in code that can be used woth both .NET Core and Xamarin. .NET Standard 2.1 includes types since .NET Core 2.1.
• Windows Desktop apps are now supported with .NET Core, for both Windows Forms and WPF (and open source). The WPF designer is part of Visual Studio 2019. The Windows Forms designer is in preview and available as a download.
• .NET Core apps now have executables by default. In past releases, apps needed to be launched via the dotnet command, like dotnet myapp.dll. Apps can now be launched with an app-specific executable, like myapp or ./myapp, depending on the operating system.
• High performance JSON APIs have been added, for reader / writer, object model and serialization scenarios. These APIs were built from scratch on top of Span and use UTF8 under the covers instead of UTF16 (like string). These APIs minimize allocations, resulting in faster performance, and much less work for the garbage collector. See Try the new System.Text.Json APIs.
• The garbage collector uses less memory by default, often a lot less. This improvement is very beneficial for scenarios where many applications are hosted on the same server. The garbage collector has also been updated to make better use of large numbers of cores, on machines with> 64 cores. See Making CPU configuration better for GC on machines with> 64 CPUs.
• .NET Core has been hardened for Docker to enable .NET applications to work predictably and efficiently in containers. The garbage collector and thread pool have been updated to work much better when a container has been configured for limited memory or CPU. .NET Core docker images are smaller, particularly the SDK image. See: Running with Server GC in a Small Container Scenario Part 0, Running with Server GC in a Small Container Scenario Part 1 – Hard Limit for the GC Heap and Using .NET and Docker Together – DockerCon 2019 Update.
• Raspberry Pi and ARM chips are now supported to enable IoT development, including with the remote Visual Studio debugger. You can deploy apps that listen to sensors, and print messages or images on a display, all using the new GPIO APIs. ASP.NET can be used to expose data as an API or as a site that enables configuring an IoT device.

Platform support
.NET Core 3.1 is supported on the following operating systems:

• Alpine: 3.10+
• Debian: 9+
• Ubuntu: 16.04+
• Fedora: 29+
• RHEL: 6+
• openSUSE: 15+
• SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES): 12 SP2 +
• macOS: 10.13+
• Windows Client: 7, 8.1, 10 (1607+)
• Windows Server: 2012 R2 +

Note: Windows Forms and WPF apps are only functional and supported on Windows.

Chip support follows:

• x64 on Windows, macOS, and Linux
• x86 on Windows
• ARM32 on Windows and Linux
• ARM64 on Linux (kernel 4.14+)

Note: Please ensure that .NET Core 3.1 ARM64 deployments use Linux kernel 4.14 version or later. For example, Ubuntu 18.04 satisfies this requirement, but 16.04 does not.