.NET Framework 4.6.2 and .NET Standard 2.0 incompatibility

Question

A project targets .NET Framework 4.6.2.

A project uses NuGet package Entity Framework Core that references .NET Standard 2.0 (it appeared in packages folder)

As far as I know, .NET 4.6.2 and .NET Standard 2.0 are incompatible. Could it cause any issues?

Answer 1

As of the latest tooling updates in VS 2017 15.3 and .NET Core 2.0.0 SDK (released in August 2017), the minimum version of .NET Framework that supports .NET Standard 2.0 is 4.6.1.

This is achieved by the tooling which adds compatibility DLLs to make sure that libraries load and work. There are only a handful of APIs that aren't supported on 4.6.1-4.7, but Entity Framework Core is supposed to work on 4.6.1+.

For .NET Framework 4.7.1+, the tooling no longer needs to inject those libraries.