.NET Framework should not be used for new projects unless absolutely necessary (IIRC MS Office Add-ins use it) because it is legacy, has (relatively) poor perfo

.NET Framework should not be used for new projects unless absolutely necessary (IIRC MS Office Add-ins use it) because it is legacy, has (relatively) poor performance and will not receive any new features. C# and .NET (6/7/8) is what you may be looking for. The entrypoint for that would be the basics[0] (just pick in the left column whatever strikes your fancy, the official docs are good) and then if you are interested in back-end dev - ASP.NET Core[1]. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csha... [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/minimal-apis/overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/m... The rough overview of terms you have mentioned is as follows: .NET (6+) - the platform almost everything runs on, like OpenJDK but encompasses the standard library and certain nuget packages as well ASP.NET Core - main .NET's web framework for developing web applications like LOB CRUDs, gRPC-based microservices, etc. Doesn't really have alternatives that offer comparable performance/features ratio EF Core - main .NET's ORM framework, its popular alternative is Dapper which is more hands-on and focused on writing SQL code directly Notable mention: .NET Core used to be the name for .NET Core 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x version but was later on rebranded to just .NET. The version 4 was skipped to avoid confusion with .NET Framework 4.x which will live on forever by the nature of being included with Windows.