What exactly is .net vNext. .net core vs vNext differences / explanation

Question

Hi I'm currently working in a project that uses PCL libraries, we are migrating everything to .net standard. I was reading about .net standard what is, what is not, what supports or not and I came across with the famous table of versions/platforms (more info)

The thing that I don't understand is: What is vNext? I thought I understood what is it, but I think I'm wrong, and the fact is that I can't find my answer in any place even in Microsoft blogs/web sites. I thought it was a new version of the framework that has some new features and improvements like compile to native and the new ryujit etc... But every time I search vnext I always see the ASP.Net vNext and never .net vNext and ASP is the web stuff to build pages etc. But according to the table above, version 1.6 of .net standard supports vNext which is a framework.

If I check this page I can't see any .net vNext there.

• Can someone explain me what exactly is this vNext thing?
• How can I download it and work with it?
• Did Microsoft dropped the name vNext to use .net core?
• Let's say I want to create a CLI vnext projectm how can I do that?
• I have .net core installed, if I create a new .net core console app I don't see the options to compile to native for example, so I assume that is not vNext!

Answer 1

The name vNext is just a placeholder for "Whatever the future version number will be, we have not decided it yet". It is not a specific "version" you can download or build against.

If you look at the table from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/library you will see some of the vNext values have been filled in because the version numbers have been decided on.

If you truely want to build using "vNext" you need to get the source code of the latest development branch for the platform you are wanting to work on, compile it (or find a pre-release version that has it pre-compiled) and use that pre-release version to build your project.

For the features of Compile to .NET Native and RyuJit those are features of the Roslyn compiler and is bundled with Visual Studio 2015 and newer.