.NET Standard Library vs. .NET Standard

12
votes

Reading some blogs and the official documentation for .NET Core 1.0, I'm still quite confused (like many others).
Don't get me wrong, I've literally read dozens of posts on the web trying to understand the architecture and terms for this new platform.

Reading the docs and blogs, this is what they say about .NET Standard Library:

The .NET Standard Library is a formal specification of .NET APIs that are intended to be available on all .NET runtimes.

But they also use this term: .NET Standard and netstandard as you can see on the Platform Support table.

Question: .NET Standard Library == .NET Standard? If not, what's difference?

1
.net.net-core
Same thing. ".NET Standard" is how you say it, "netstandard" is how you write it in your project file. Just wait long enough until the tooling (like VS) catches up and a lot of this terminology misery and irrelevant history will stop hurting. – Hans Passant
@HansPassant based on your profile and rep, I believe that's an answer, so you can write it down and I'll accept that as an answer. – QuantumHive
I post these comments to help somebody else to write an accurate answer. Like you. But @Nate already did, looks fine to me, consider accepting that answer. – Hans Passant

1 Answers

9
votes

.NET Standard Library is the official name going forward. netstandard is the moniker used in project files and means the same thing. The package is called NETStandard.Library on NuGet.

During the development of DNX and ultimately .NET Core, the names and monikers changed a number of times as the team iterated on the design. Now that .NET Core has reached 1.0, it shouldn't change any more.