Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2017 RC on Microsoft Connect so I guess you already have it installed on your machine while it is hot. So what exactly does this new release ship for .NET Core developers?
Figure 1: .NET Core bits installed along with Visual Studio 2017.
| Well, easily you can see a list of installed products on your machine from Control Panel | Programs, whose names are really confusing. Let’s try to understand them in the following way. |
.NET Core 1.0.0 Family
The 1.0.0 release was published in June. So the first three items are related to it.
- The Runtime is what our apps compile against and link with.
- The SDK contains the tooling we use such as dotnet commands. T* he Windows Server Hosting should be ASP.NET Core module for IIS.
.NET Core 1.0.1 Family
.NET Core 1.0.1 was published in September. So the last three items are for it.
- It has no Runtime installed. (Why?)
- It has two versions of SDK, Preview 2 and 3. SDK Preview 3 enables MSBuild support to replace project.json.
- It has VS 2015 Tooling Preview 2.
My Guess
- 1.0.1 does not have an individual runtime because it is only a patched release and many bits can reuse 1.0.0’s.
- Its Preview 2 SDK is provided to match 1.0.0 release. If any project with global.json mandates this SDK version, then it can still work.
- Preview 3 is the version that MSBuild support is back.
- Once the SDK and VS Tooling reaches RTM, we won’t need to be confused by their versions.
I will do more digging to see what else I can find.