Microsoft's updates ASP.NET roadmap; RTM now slated for June
Microsoft has some new targets for its .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 deliverables, according to an updated timetable published on May 6.
A quick refresher on branding: ASP.NET is Microsoft's now-cross-platform, server-side Web-development framework. ASP.NET Core 1.0 is the technology formerly known as ASP.NET 5. And .NET Core 1.0 is what Microsoft was calling .NET Core 5 until earlier this year.
Here are the latest ship targets:
- .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 runtime and libraries will be available in mid-May. Tooling will be Preview 1 and bundled with this release.
- .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM (release) runtime and libraries will be available by the end of June. Tooling will be Preview 2 and bundled with this release.
Microsoft officials said the RC2 runtime/libraries release won't change between RC2 and RTM unless "something critical happens." RC2 will have a "go-live" license, meaning Microsoft will officially support the code.
"We will continue to make changes and stabilize the tooling until it RTMs with Visual Studio '15.'" today's blog post adds. Visual Studio '15 is the next version of Visual Studio, which some have said will be officially dubbed Visual Studio 2016 (meaning it will be out later this year). Microsoft hasn't provided an official RTM target for VS'15.
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The ASP.NET team has been working on the cross-platform, modular ASP.NET release now known as ASP.NET Core 1.0, for two and a half years. At the end of 2014, Microsoft forked the .NET Framework to create .NET Core. At that time, Microsoft announced it planned to open source more of its .NET programming framework and take it cross-platform to Linux and Mac in the form of ASP.NET 5, its server-side web-development framework. The centerpiece of that effort was .NET Core -- a fork of the .NET Framework.
Until early this year, the delivery target for Release Candidate 2 of ASP.NET Core 1.0 had been February 2016 and RTM target was Q'1 of 2016. Microsoft pushed those dates back in late January, marking them as "TBD" (to be determined).
Microsoft execs decided after shipping ASP.NET Core 1.0 Release Candidate 1 that the company needed to add support to .NET Core for building native console, class libraries and server applications. That process "has proved to be harder than we anticipated," today's blog post notes.