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.NET Core 3.0 Not Shipping with Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft Says
Microsoft-centric developers asking if the much-awaited .NET Core 3.0 release will ship with the much-awaited Visual Studio 2019 release now have the much-awaited answer to their question: No.
The news came with today's launch of .NET Core 3 Preview 3, the new direction for the ageing, Windows-only .NET Framework, taking it into the modern development era of open source and modular cross-platform functionality. While the .NET Framework will get security updates and such, new feature development is being ploughed into .NET Core.
But developers will have to wait to target .NET Core 3.0 in Visual Studio 2019.
"We have seen people asking questions about when .NET Core 3.0 will be released," said Microsoft exec Richard Lander in a blog post today (March 6). "They also want to know if .NET Core 3.0 will be included in Visual Studio 2019. Visual Studio 2019 RC was recently released, which is part of the motivation for the questions.
"We plan to ship .NET Core 3.0 in the second half of 2019," he continued. "We will announce the ship date at the Build 2019 conference."
That conference starts May 6 in Seattle.
Of course, developers already knew that VS 2019, which recently hit Release Candidate status, will ship on April 2. Lander said .NET Core 2.1 and 2.2 will be included in that release.
"At the point of the final .NET Core 3.0 release, we'll announce support for a specific Visual Studio 2019 update, and .NET Core 3.0 will be included in Visual Studio 2019 from that point on," Lander said.
Meanwhile, .NET Core 3 Preview 3 -- the point of today's post -- features improvements in .NET Core SDK installers, Docker containers, Range and Index. Lander also provided updates on the Windows Desktop and Entity Framework projects.
Support for WPF and WinForms projects was big news, as those types of projects were among the last to be moved to the new .NET Core direction. "We are still working on transitioning these code bases from a proprietary build system to an open source one, based on dotnet/arcade," Lander said. "We are coming to the tail end of this phase of the project and then expect that remaining parts of the WPF code base will be published afterwards, likely after Preview 4."
Speaking of the preview program, Lander noted Microsoft wants to release previews every month, noting that, coincidentally, the preview version numbers are now lining up with the number of the month (Preview 3 being released in March, the third month of the year). "We hope to continue that pattern until the final release," he said.
Microsoft's release notes provide all the details on what's new in Preview 3, summed up by:
- ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview 3 (bugs, features)
- Entity Framework Core 3.0 Preview 3
- .NET Core SDK installers will now Upgrade in Place
- Container image availability in the Microsoft Container Registry (MCR)
- Docker and cgroup memory Limits
- Index and Range
- F# 4.6
- dotnet fsi preview
- .NET Standard 2.1
- Work continues on WinForms and WPF
.NET Core's development progress can be tracked on the .NET Foundation's GitHub site.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.