.NET Core is a general purpose, modular, cross-platform and open source implementation of .NET. It includes a runtime, framework libraries, compilers and tools that support a variety of chip and OS targets. These components can be used together or separately.
At Microsoft, .NET has always been an important component of other teams' products and has largely shipped on their schedules. It means that we have to take their dates seriously and integrate them into the .NET Core schedule.
- The 1.0 release is accompanied with a preview version of the Visual Studio and command-line tooling. The Visual Studio tooling for 1.0 through 1.2 based on MSBuild and csproj should be publicly available in Fall 2016 and reach RTM quality in Spring 2017.
Microsoft provides commercially reasonable support for ASP.NET Core 1.0, .NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0 on the OS and Version detailed in the table above.
Microsoft provides support for ASP.NET Core 1.0, .NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0 on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. For an explanation of available support options, please visit [Support for Business and Developers](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/contactus81?Audience=Commercial&SegNo=4).
The .NET Core maintainers have taken a liberal approach to contributions since the outset of the .NET Core open source project and have taken changes outside of the published [priorities](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/project-docs/project-priorities.md).
.NET Core will ship as part of many Linux distros and we are actively working with key partners in the Linux community to make it natural for .NET Core to go everywhere people need it. We are constantly looking to expand our distro support and welcome contributions and collaborations in this direction.