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Desktop, Web, Cloud, Mobile, IoT. We have never experienced such diversity in application environments before – each with its own set of particularities, and all of them accessed by an ever-increasing number of users. Considering all the operating systems, protocols, and standards used by these environments, there’s a crescent trend related to cross-platform development: the ability to create one application capable of being seamlessly executed in multiple environments. There is a myriad of problems to be addressed in cross-platform development, varying from which application environments are addressed in each scenario to specifics related to the development stack used by each application. While there is no silver bullet that can address all these problems at the same time, it is expected that one year from now all .NET developers can use only one .NET framework to target the most common application environments currently in place.

Since last year, with the first announcement of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft has been steering its .NET ecosystem initiatives towards the creation of a truly unified application development platform. With a new approach for Desktop development, .NET Core 3.0 closes some of the gaps of cross-platform applications for the Web. In the next year, other new features are expected to bring other application environments even closer, culminating with the release of .NET 5 – the first version of the intended unified framework. In this eMag, Five authors talk about the current state of .NET Core 3.0 from multiple perspectives. Each author brings their experience and ideas on how different .NET Core 3.0 features are relevant to the .NET ecosystem, both present and future. 
 

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