At Build 2019, Microsoft announced .NET 5, the next big release in the .NET family. It is a game-changer for .NET as it will be a unified platform using which developers can target various platforms including Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more. .NET 5 will be supported by Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code.

While .NET 5 will be coming out in November 2020, today Microsoft announced the .NET 5 Preview 1 for the users. To try out .NET 5 for yourself, you will need to get .NET 5.0 Preview 1 SDK and .NET 5.0 Preview 1 Runtime. You can also update your target framework on your existing projects using the following command:

<TargetFramework>netcoreapp5.0</TargetFramework>

.NET 5 will improve .NET in the following ways:

Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.

Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono.

Build that product out of a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.

.NET 5 will be Generally Available to everyone in November of 2020. Microsoft is currently working on finalizing it for the release and the company said it plans to make the transition from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5 as painless as possible. Microsoft does recommend developers to try out .NET 5 Preview 1 to know more about the framework and prepare accordingly for the transition.