People get caught up on versions of the framework. Handy guide: .NET Framework (v1.0-4.8) - 4.8 Currently still supported, but don't build anything new in it.

People get caught up on versions of the framework. Handy guide: .NET Framework (v1.0-4.8) - 4.8 Currently still supported, but don't build anything new in it. It only gets very minor updates. Not cross platform (Mono can help, but euuughhh), slower, stuck with C# 7.3. .NET Core (v1.0-3.1) - Out of support, transition period between .NET Framework and modern .NET. Cross platform support, some support for AOT compile. .NET (v6-8) - LTS every other version starting with 6, 36 months LTS, cross platform, magnitudes faster than .NET Framework. Successor to Framework and Core. Many features of .NET Framework have been abstracted to NuGet packages. .NET Standard (v1.0-2.1) - Interop API specification for Framework/Core/.NET. Write a class library that targets .NET Standard and you can use it in more than one runtime. You'll see a lot of NuGet packages target Standard. If you're writing a class library you should probably target Standard. "Core" products/packages - Many packages/libraries have been renamed to include "Core" in the title. ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, etc. These are libraries/packages that only have implement their core functionality. For example, ASP.NET Core has some basic implementations, but does not include things like Web API, MVC, Authorization, Razor. If you build an ASP.NET Core project you'll be pulling in a lot of packages based on your needs. The features/libraries are more atomic and less reliant on a full version update of ASP.NET Core.