This exactly! The branding and versioning of .NET is a complete disaster. There's .NET Framework (where even simply getting the current runtime version requires

This exactly! The branding and versioning of .NET is a complete disaster. There's .NET Framework (where even simply getting the current runtime version requires several convoluted hoops, since System.Environment.Version has gone the way of browser user agents and frozen itself at "4.0.30319"). Then there is .NET Standard, which was at version 1 and 2 (which are newer than .NET Framework 4.0 or 4.5? but have significantly fewer APIs available, and many classes are missing methods and properties that were present in .NET Framework). Then there is .NET Core which reset the versioning scheme again? Then there is .NET 5 which is newer than all of these, but is it actually fully supported on non-windows platforms? Then you need Newtonsoft.JSON, and then you get to watch your entire project blow up because you have three different dependencies that use different versions of netstandard/netcore/netframework and the assemblies aren't compatible. I really hope going forward there will be just one unified .NET 6 that works the same on all platforms and doesn't need a million different builds of the same nuget package. Edit: And even after all this, deploying your app by just copying the .exe and .dlls to a pristine machine often fails, because the corresponding .NET framework runtime isn't installed. And then you need to be a lawyer to figure out if you can even ship the net framework installer to your customer or how to handle that. You would think Microsoft would have a better story to sell to developers as what should be "the way" to develop and distribute windows executables. It seems like the only way to really be portable is to use an ancient version of Visual C to write win32 directly, and link the corresponding msvcrt statically.