The first public release of .NET Core 2.0. You can develop .NET Core 2.0 apps with Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.3, Visual Studio for Mac or VS Code.

ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 is also releasing today and takes advantage of the improvements in .NET Core 2.0 and Visual Studio 2017.

You can download and get started with .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 right now, on Windows, Linux and macOS:

• .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1
• Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.3 for Windows
• Visual Studio for Mac
• Visual Studio Code

You can see complete details of the release in the .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 release notes. Known issues and workarounds are included in the releases notes. Please check them out, particularly if you are using Visual Studio for Mac or VS Code.

The following improvements are included in .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1:

• Massive API increase (>100%) relative to .NET Core 1.x.
• Support for .NET Standard 2.0.
• Support for referencing .NET Framework libraries and NuGet packages.
• Support for Visual Basic.
• API docs for .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0.
• OpenSSL is no longer used on macOS – .NET Core uses the Apple crypto libraries.
• Live Unit Testing support for .NET Core.

Enabling you to use your code on more Linux platforms

.NET Core 2.0 treats Linux as a single operating system, much like it does with Windows and macOS.

.NET Standard 2.0

.NET Standard allows sharing code, binaries and skills across all flavors of .NET, including .NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin, Unity, and UWP.

Here is what’s new with .NET Standard 2.0:

• Has a much bigger API surface. It’s extended to cover the intersection between
  .NET Framework and Xamarin. This also makes .NET Core 2.0 much bigger as it
  implements .NET Standard 2.0. The total number of APIs added to .NET Standard
  is ~20,000.
• Can reference existing .NET Framework libraries. The best thing is:
  no recompile required, so this includes existing NuGet packages. Of course,
  this will only work if the consumed libraries use APIs that exist in .NET
  Standard. However, our extensive API surface results in 70% of all NuGet
  packages to be API compatible with .NET Standard 2.0.