As explained before, the ASP.NET Core 3 framework has been built, from the beginning, with cross-platform support in mind. It supports a wide variety of operating systems and technologies such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Docker, Azure, and others.
ASP.NET Core 3 currently supports the following Linux distributions:
- Ubuntu 14, 16
- Linux Mint 17, 18
- Debian 8
- Fedora
- CentOS 7.1 and Oracle 7.1
- SUSE Enterprise Server 64 bits
- openSUSE 64 bits
Concerning macOS, it currently only supports the following (other versions might be added later):
- macOS 10.11
- macOS 10.12
For application development, you may develop on Windows using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code and then deploy your ASP.NET Core 3 application to your target system.
If you choose so, you can of course directly develop on Linux and macOS using several system-specific source code editors. On Linux, you could use Visual Studio Code, Vim/Vi, Sublime, or Emacs, for example. On macOS, you could use Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, or any other macOS-specific text editor.
The Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio Code developer environments would be the preferred choice, though, since they provide everything necessary to be highly productive and to be able to debug and understand your code as well as navigate within it easily. That is why we are going to use those IDEs throughout the rest of this book.
After building your application, you can use several web servers to run it. Here are some examples:
- Apache
- IIS
- Kestrel self-host
- NGINX
Cross-platform is a huge factor, and we have seen how ASP.NET Core 3 caters to it, but there's another buzzword in the software engineering fraternity called microservices. Let's have a look at it with respect to ASP.NET Core 3 in the next section.