.NET Core on Raspberry Pi

.NET Core SDK is available on ARM32/ARM64 which is used by Raspberry Pi but many users have reported it's more convenient to cross build (i.e. dotnet publish -r linux-arm) binaries from desktop as it allows for much faster iteration cycle.

These steps have been tested on a RPi 2 and RPi 3 with Linux and Windows.

Note: All models of generation 1 and Pi Zero are not supported because the .NET Core JIT depends on armv7 instructions not available on those versions.

Creating an app:

Install .NET Core SDK into a supported developer configuration. (Raspberry Pi itself is supported only as deployment target but there is an unsupported version of the SDK available as well.)
From the terminal/commandline create a folder named helloworld and go into it.
Run dotnet new console
You can find a helloworld.csproj file is created under current directory.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.1</TargetFramework>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

If you get restore errors, make sure you have a nuget.config file next to your csproj that includes the dotnet-core myget feed: <add key="dotnet-core" value="https://dotnet.myget.org/F/dotnet-core/api/v3/index.json" />.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <packageSources>
    <add key="dotnet-core" value="https://dotnet.myget.org/F/dotnet-core/api/v3/index.json" />
  </packageSources>
</configuration>

Publishing an app to run on the Pi:

Run dotnet publish -r <runtime identifier> for example dotnet publish -r win-arm to publish the application for windows and dotnet publish -r linux-arm for Linux running on Raspberry Pi.
Under ./bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.1/<runtime identifier>/publish or .\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1\<runtime identifier>\publish you will see the whole self contained app that you need to copy to your Raspberry Pi.

Getting the app to run on the Pi.

Linux

Install Linux on your Pi.
Install the platform dependencies from your distro's package manager for .NET Core. .NET Core depends on some packages from the Linux package manager as prerequisites to running your application.

For Raspbian Debian 9 Jessie you need to do the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl libunwind8 gettext apt-transport-https

Copy your app, i.e. whole publish directory mentioned above, to the Raspberry Pi and execute run ./helloworld to see Hello World! from .NET Core running on your Pi! (make sure you chmod 755 ./helloworld)

Win10 IoT Core

Install Windows 10 IoT Core on your Pi.
Copy your app, i.e. whole publish directory mentioned above, to the Raspberry Pi and execute run helloworld.exe to see Hello World! from .NET Core running on your Pi.

It is important that you copy the publish directory contents displayed at the end of the publish operation and not from another location in the bin folder.

Remote debugging

It is possible to setup VS Code for remote debugging. Please refer to Scott Hanselman's tutorial.

GPIO access / communicating with hardware

GPIO access as well as I2C, SPI, PWM and many more can be achieved with .NET IoT. For list of available devices please refer to device listing.

Please consider contributing to the repository or filing an issue if you cannot find the device you're looking for!

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