Microsoft Released .NET Core 3.1, a long term support release of three years

December 3, Microsoft released .NET Core 3.1, an application development platform that runs not only on Windows but also on MacOS and Linux. Being a long term support (LTS) release, it will be supported for three years.

.Net Core 3.1 is the first point release of the .Net Core 3 series, which was released in September. Since the release of 3.0, there have been improvements to enhance security.

The changes added to this release focus mainly on Blazor, a web app framework first introduced in 3.0, and Windows Desktop, and in response to a constant request from developers targeting Windows, one of the changes is the support for C++/CLI.

There are some Windows Forms controls that were abandoned: DataGrid, ToolBar, ContextMenu, Menu, MainMenu, and MenuItem. To begin with, replacement controls were already introduced in .Net Framework 2.0 in 2005, and the abandoned controls had been removed from the Visual Studio Designer Toolbox. The recommended replacement for DataGrid is DataGridView, for ToolBar is ToolStrip, for ToolBarButton is ToolStripButton, for ContextMenu is ContextMenuStrip, for MainMenu is MenuStrip, and for MenuItem is ToolstripMenuItem.

.Net Core 3.1 supports Windows, MacOS, and Linux. SDK and Runtime, Docker container images, and Snap installer are available on the project’s website,

Visual Studio 2019 16.4 was also released on the same day. It includes .NET Core 3.1.

.NET Core DL
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core