I am really confused by the terminology around platforms in .NET these days - I understood this until we had a PCL.
I found the following documents:
To begin with, the first document refers to a conceptual platform nicknamed "netstandard" as the ".NET Platform Standard". The latter calls it the ".NET Standard" (at the same time it introduces the new ".NET Standard Library").
I really don’t understand why the first document has a reservation above that the second describes the concept of a successor: It seems that at least the table showing the version release is newer in the first document.
What is the difference between the concepts of ".NET Platform Standard" and ".NET Standard Library"? The table in the second document, which describes the supposedly new concept, simply shows what is basically an old table, without a new line for this new “standard library of standards” - as if the concepts were the same in the end. Is a disclaimer simply offering a rename?
NuGet adds more secrets:
NuGet's Json.NET package has a target called ".NETStandard" (with NuGet using a third nickname for one of these things), and I guess it should be the same as "netstandard", right? This is actually the ".NET Platform Standard", right?
The RC package of Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc has a target called ".NETPlatform 5.4". So what is it? It is called differently and has a version too high to have anything to do with the .NET Platform Standard or the .NET standard library, no matter what the relationship may be between them. Hmmm.
Does anyone know what all this means?
EDIT:
I managed to figure out a little more: as Lex Lee said, the rc version of Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc does not work. It uses the short nickname "dotnet5.4", which is really referred to in the first document as deprecated and is called the ".NET Platform" for a long time. The current latest version of the package seems to be called "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc", which refers only to non-existent target names.
So, to solve part of the NuGet question, and my theory at the moment is that the ".NET Standard Library" is just a renaming of what was formerly called the ".NET Platform Standard". This leaves the term “.NET platform,” which I suspect is an even older name for any of these things when the number of versions was not reset to “1” for everything.
Perhaps someone who knows about this can confirm or fix this.