You’ve heard that .NET has gone open source. You’ve also heard that it has gone cross-platform. And you’ve even heard that Red Hat is shipping a supported version of .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So maybe you are thinking to yourself, “wow, this is fantastic! I’m going to copy these EXEs and DLLs of my .NET application over to my Red Hat machine and run them!”
Well, unfortunately, it’s not going to be quite that easy. At least not today.
First and foremost, the open source version of .NET is called “.NET Core.” It is available for many platforms, including Windows and Linux. Those .NET projects and applications that you already have running, however, were built on and for .NET Framework. And .NET Framework and .NET Core are not the same thing; they are more like siblings, which also implies that one is not a subset or child of the other.
“Well, then, what’s the point?!”
The good news is that while they are siblings, they do look a lot alike. Although they’re not identical twins, you’ll definitely recognize them as being from the same immediate family. As such, it is possible to port many existing .NET Framework applications to .NET Core.
“How hard is it to port something?”
Continue reading “Observations on Porting from .NET Framework to .NET Core”