One Integrated Library coming soon for .NET developers!

Microsoft is planning to incorporate platform integration concept called "one library to rule them all." With Dot Net Standard, developers have to master a single base library to reach multiple Dot Net platforms. The software pioneer shed further light on its plans for Dot Net Standard to enable code sharing between applications. Dot Net Standard features a set of APIs for Dot Net platforms to implement. It is positioned as a replacement for Microsoft's Portable Class Libraries going forward and will serve as tooling for building multiplatform Dot Net libraries.

Currently, there are three major "flavors" of Dot Net -- Dot Net Framework, Dot Net Core, and Xamarin -- which means developers must master three different class libraries to write code that works across all implementations.

"Dot Net Standard solves the code-sharing problem for Dot Net developers across all platforms by bringing all the APIs that you expect and love across the environments that you need: desktop applications, mobile apps and games, and cloud services," said Microsoft's Immo Landwerth, the program manager on the Dot Net team.

Also in the works is Dot Net Standard 2.0, for implementation by the three Dot Net variants. Version 2.0 will have an API surface covering XML, serialization, networking, IO, threading, and core capabilities.

"We've created Dot Net Standard so that sharing and reusing code between multiple Dot Net platforms become much easier," Landwerth said. "With Dot Net Standard 2.0, we're focusing on compatibility. In order to support Dot Net Standard 2.0 in Dot Net Core and UWP (Universal Windows Platform), we'll be extending these platforms to include many more of the existing APIs." This will also include a compatibility shim for referencing binaries that were compiled against the Dot Net Framework.

Tooling for Dot Net (.NET) Standard 2.0 will ship in the same timeframe as the upcoming release of Visual Studio, now called Visual Studio 15, Landwerth said. The Dev 15 release currently is available in a preview form; Microsoft declined to state when it would be generally available. Developers will reference Dot Net Standard as a NuGet package. "It will have first-class support from Visual Studio, VS Code, as well as Xamarin Studio," Landwerth said.

Microsoft Dot Net Standard is needed because of forking that has occurred on the Dot Net platform, according to Microsoft. "On the one hand, this [forking] is actually a really good thing. It allowed tailoring Dot Net to fit the needs that a single platform wouldn't have been able to," said Landwerth. "But on the other hand, this forking poses a massive problem for developers writing code for multiple Dot Net platforms because there isn't a unified class library to target."

Dot Net Core, which provided the cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's Dot Net runtime, was intended to lay the foundation for a portable Dot Net platform to unify APIs. "Unfortunately, it didn't result in a great tooling experience," said Landwerth. "Since our goal was to represent any Dot Net platform, we had to break it up into smaller NuGet packages."

Microsoft plans to ship updated versions of Dot Net Core, Xamarin, and UWP that will add APIs to support Dot Net Standard 2.0. Dot Net Framework 4.6.1 already implements APIs that are part of Dot Net Standard 2.0.