What's new in .NET Core 2

The main focus of .NET Core 2 is the huge increase in scope. There are more than double the number of APIs included, and it supports .NET Standard 2 (covered later in this chapter). You can also reference .NET Framework assemblies with no recompilation required. This should just work as long as the assemblies only use APIs that have been implemented in .NET Core.

This means that more NuGet packages will work with .NET Core. Finding whether your favorite library was supported or not was always a challenge in the previous version. The author set up a repository listing package compatibility to help with this. You can find the ASP.NET Core Library and Framework Support (ANCLAFS) list at https://anclafs.com/ and https://github.com/jpsingleton/ANCLAFS. If you want to make a change, then please send a pull request. Hopefully, in future, all the packages will support Core, and this list will no longer be required.

There is now support in .NET Core for Visual Basic, and more Linux distributions. You can also perform live unit testing with Visual Studio 2017 (Enterprise Edition only), much like the old NCrunch extension. We'll talk more about tooling in Chapter 3, Setting Up Your Environment, where we will also cover containerization.