Finally, after some months of delay due to the replatforming of DNX on top of the new .NET Core CLI, at the beginning of the week all things RC2 have been released.

There are already tons of documention on how to get started, both on the ASP.NET Core Documentation and .NET Core Documentation sites, but in this post I just want to collect all the announcements.

Announcements

The three main pieces of the puzzle, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core, all RC2.

Then there is the Tooling, preview 1: Announcing Web Tooling for ASP.NET Core RC2.

It’s important to understand why one thing is RC2 and the other is preview.

Libraries and runtime are RC2, and will be RTM end of June: they are a real RC2, and they have been working on it for more than 2 years.

The tooling, that isthe CLI and the support inside Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are still a preview, and they have been working on it, expecially the web tooling part, only since end of last year: they will become RTM only with the next version of Visual Studio “15”.

Changes

A lot changed, between RC1 and RC2, but do not worry too much: changes are mainly in the hosting and runtime parts of apps. No major change in the common APIs… well, maybe some renaming and moving of namespaces.

Here are links to what changed in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core between RC1/DNX and RC2:

New website

But there is more to it. All things .NET can now be downloaded from the, IMHO, super-cool new url:

http://dot.net

From there you can download the standard framework, .NET Core, and mobile development tools for Xamarin.