Announcing .NET Core 3.1

Richard

December 3rd, 2019

Announcing .NET Core 3.1

We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.1. It’s really just a small set of fixes and refinements over .NET Core 3.0, which we released just over two months ago. The most important feature is that .NET Core 3.1 is an long-term supported (LTS) release and will be supported for three years. As we’ve done in the past, we wanted to take our time before releasing the next LTS release. The extra two months (after .NET Core 3.0) allowed us to select and implement the right set of improvements over what was already a very stable base. .NET Core 3.1 is now ready to be used wherever your imagination or business need takes it.

You can download .NET Core 3.1, for Windows, macOS, and Linux:

ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also being released today.

Visual Studio 2019 16.4 was also released today and includes .NET Core 3.1. It is a required update to use .NET Core 3.1 with Visual Studio. For Visual Studio 2019 users, we recommend simply updating Visual Studio to 16.4 and instead of separately downloading .NET Core 3.1.

Visual Studio for Mac also supports and includes .NET Core 3.1, in the Visual Studio for Mac 8.4 Preview channel. You will need to opt into the Preview channel to use .NET Core 3.1.

Release notes:

The changes in .NET Core 3.1 were primarily focussed on Blazor and Windows Desktop, the two new and large additions in .NET Core 3.0. This includes support for C++/CLI, which has been a regular request for developers targeting Windows.

Before we take a look at what’s new in .NET Core 3.1, let’s take a quick look at the key improvements in .NET Core 3.0, which is the bulk of what’s important to consider for .NET Core 3.1.

Recap of .NET Core 3.0 Improvements

The following key improvements were delivered in .NET Core 3.0. We’ve already heard from developers of big sites that it is working super well for them.

Platform support

.NET Core 3.1 is supported on the following operating systems:

Alpine: 3.10+

Debian: 9+

Ubuntu: 16.04+

Fedora: 29+

centOS: 7+

RHEL: 6+

openSUSE: 15+

SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES): 12 SP2+

macOS: 10.13+

Windows Client: 7, 8.1, 10 (1607+)

Windows Server: 2012 R2+

Note: Windows Forms and WPF apps are only functional and supported on Windows.

Chip support follows:

x64 on Windows, macOS, and Linux

x86 on Windows

ARM32 on Windows and Linux

ARM64 on Linux (kernel 4.14+)

Note: Please ensure that .NET Core 3.1 ARM64 deployments use Linux kernel 4.14 version or later. For example, Ubuntu 18.04 satisfies this requirement, but 16.04 does not.

Windows Forms Controls Removal

The following Windows Forms controls have been removed from .NET Core 3.1:

DataGrid

ToolBar

ContextMenu

Menu

MainMenu

MenuItem

These controls were replaced with more powerful controls in .NET Framework 2.0, back in 2005. They have not been available by default in the Visual Studio Designer Toolbox for many years. As a result, we decided to remove these controls and focus only on the new ones.

The following replacements are recommended:

Old Control (API) Recommended Replacement Other associated APIs removed DataGrid DataGridView DataGridCell, DataGridRow, DataGridTableCollection, DataGridColumnCollection, DataGridTableStyle, DataGridColumnStyle, DataGridLineStyle, DataGridParentRowsLabel, DataGridParentRowsLabelStyle, DataGridBoolColumn, DataGridTextBox, GridColumnStylesCollection, GridTableStylesCollection, HitTestType ToolBar ToolStrip ToolBarAppearance ToolBarButton ToolStripButton ToolBarButtonClickEventArgs, ToolBarButtonClickEventHandler, ToolBarButtonStyle, ToolBarTextAlign ContextMenu ContextMenuStrip Menu ToolStripDropDown, ToolstripDropDownMenu MenuItemCollection MainMenu MenuStrip MenuItem ToolstripMenuItem

Yes, this is an unfortunate breaking change. You will see build breaks if you are using the controls we removed in your applications. Also, if you open .NET Core 3.0 applications in the latest versions of the .NET Core Windows Forms designer, you will see errors if you are using these controls.

We recommend you update your applications to .NET Core 3.1 and move to the alternative controls. Replacing the controls is a straight-forward process, essentially “find and replace”.

First, we should have made these changes before we released .NET Core 3.0, and we appologize for that. We try to avoid late changes, and even more for breaking changes, and it pains us to make this one.

As we got further into the Windows Forms designer project, we realized that these controls were not aligned with creating modern applications and should never have been part of the .NET Core port of Windows Forms. We also saw that they would require more time from us to support than made sense.

Our goal is to continue to improve Windows Forms for high DPI, accessibility, and reliability, and this late change was required to enable us to focus on delivering that.

C++/CLI

We added support for creating C++/CLI (AKA “managed C++”) components that can be used with .NET Core 3.0+, in Visual Studio 2019 16.4. You need to install the “Desktop development with C++” workload and the “C++/CLI support” component in order to use C++/CLI.

This component adds a couple templates that you can use:

CLR Class Library (.NET Core)

CLR Empty Project (.NET Core)

If you cannot find them, just search for them in the New Project dialog.

C++/CLI is only enabled on Windows. You cannot use C++/CLI components targeted for .NET Framework with .NET Core or vice versa.

Closing

We recommend moving to .NET Core 3.1 as soon as you can. It is a great release (largely due to 3.0) that brings improvements to so many aspects of .NET Core. It is also a long term support (LTS) release, and will be supported for three years.

Life cycle update:

.NET Core 3.0 will reach end-of-life three months from today, on March 3, 2020.

.NET Core 2.2 will each end of life on December 23rd.

.NET Core 2.1 will be supported until August 2021 (it is also an LTS release).

The following .NET Core posts are recommended reading to learn more about what you get with .NET Core 3.1 and other projects we’ve been working on.

Fundamentals

Desktop

ASP.NET

General