Microsoft Project Manager Immo Landwerth has announced details for the forthcoming .NET Core 2 release, slated for Spring 2017. This is a big release for the .NET Core platform because version 2 marks a significant expansion to .NET Core's capabilities.
Let's step back and consider the upcoming 1.0 release of .NET Core. This is scheduled to ship with the formal release of Visual Studio 2017. But that release will follow .NET Standard 1.0, which is lacking numerous APIs existing .NET Framework developers are used to having. By comparison, .NET Standard 2.0 will more than double the number of APIs available. Following the standard means that .NET code can be shared much more smoothly across the .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin.
Developers who build .NET libraries targeting multiple platforms should be prepared to switch to .NET Standard 2.0 as this will replace Portable Class Libraries. Another key detail of .NET Core is that the F# compiler is considered a key component, this is not solely a C#/VB project. The OS support for Version 1.0 is certainly ambitious, as it supports Windows 7+, Mac OS X, and numerous flavors of Linux (8). Supported platforms for .NET Core have not yet been released, but at this point can be expected to be very similar.
So when exactly will 2.0 be available? A concrete date has not been provided, but published information says Spring 2017. Given that VS2017 has to be released first (which theoretically would occur first quarter 2017) the release date for .NET Core 2 may very well coincide with Build 2017 scheduled to take place in early May.
