.NET Core is an open source framework (hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/dotnet/core), released by Microsoft and maintained by the .NET community, to build cross-platform applications for Windows, Linux, and macOS. You can get it from Microsoft's official .NET Core site (https://www.microsoft.com/net/core) or GitHub. If you are using Visual Studio 2019, then you can get it as part of the installer.

As Microsoft is investing more on .NET Core and announced that they are going to merge .NET Framework in .NET Core 5, it's now becoming a core framework for the Microsoft application development platform. This helps our learning of the basics of .NET Core, so we can start building cross-platform applications.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following core topics:

• Overview of .NET Core
• Installing .NET Core with Visual Studio 2019
• A quick lap around .NET Core commands
• Creating .NET Core applications using Visual Studio 2019
• Publishing .NET Core applications using Visual Studio 2019
• Creating, building, and publishing .NET Core web apps to Microsoft Azure