Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
47 lines (38 loc) · 2.57 KB

sdk.md

File metadata and controls

47 lines (38 loc) · 2.57 KB
Raw
title description keywords author ms.author ms.date ms.topic ms.prod ms.technology ms.devlang ms.assetid
.NET Core SDK Overview
Find out about the .NET Core SDK, which is a set of libraries and tools used to create .NET Core projects.
.NET, .NET Core
blackdwarf
mairaw
06/20/2016
article
.net-core
dotnet-cli
dotnet
26bc9822-e42b-48ec-b0d6-499dc604add7

.NET Core SDK Overview

Introduction

.NET Core Software Development Kit (SDK) is a set of libraries and tools that allow developers to create .NET Core applications and libraries. This is the package that developers will most likely acquire.

It contains the following components:

  1. The .NET Core Command Line Tools that are used to build applications
  2. .NET Core (libraries and runtime) that allow applications to both be built and run
  3. The dotnet driver for running the CLI commands as well as running applications

Acquiring the .NET Core SDK

As with any tooling, the first thing is to get the tools to your machine. Depending on your scenario, you can either use the native installers to install the SDK or use the installation shell script.

The native installers are primarily meant for developer's machines. The SDK is distributed using each supported platform's native install mechanism, for instance DEB packages on Ubuntu or MSI bundles on Windows. These installers will install and set up the environment as needed for the user to use the SDK immediately after the install. However, they also require administrative privileges on the machine. You can view the installation instructions on the .NET Core installation guide.

Install scripts, on the other hand, do not require administrative privileges. However, they will also not install any prerequisites on the machine; you need to install all of the prerequisites manually. The scripts are meant mostly for setting up build servers or when you wish to install the tools without admin privileges (do note the prerequisites caveat above). You can find more information on the install script reference topic. If you are interested in how to set up SDK on your CI build server you can take a look at the SDK with CI servers document.

By default, the SDK will install in a "side-by-side" (SxS) manner. This means that multiple versions of the CLI tools can coexist at any given time on a single machine. How the correct version gets used is explained in more detail in the driver section of .NET Core Command Line Tools topic.