[hitgeek]

.Net Standard is the standard. There is only 1 standard.

.Net Core is one implementation of the standard. .Net 4.6 is another implementation of the standard. Mono, Xamarin, Universal Windows Platforms are other implementations.

The idea is that any code written for .Net standard, will work across the different implementations.

[iainmerrick]

As I said, I don't really understand how it's all supposed to fit together, but what I've found in practice is that completely random and innocuous methods are missing from the System frameworks depending on which "standard" you target in Visual Studio.

[akoeplinger]

The .NET Standard spec has multiple _versions_, each of them adding more APIs: https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/versions...

It's true that .NET Standard 1.0-1.6 had a lot of gaps but these should be rectified with 2.0 now so you shouldn't run into these problems anymore (otherwise there's usually a good reason why a method/API is missing from the standard).

Disclaimer: I'm working on Mono for Microsoft/Xamarin, primarily class libraries and tools.

[oaiey]

Thanks for your work!

[kbenson]

It's been covered by others here already, but my understanding, as an outsider reading all this, is that .Net Standard is like C99 or C++14, a standard or specification that defined how the language is to function, and then .Net Core is implementation, like GCC or Clang are compilers that implement the C/C++ standards. In the prior example given, Java has a standard for each version that defined how the language functions, and then there are virtual machines that implement that standard, such as Oracle's (originally Sun's) JVM implementation, OpenJDK, or in the distant past, the Blackdown Java port[1].

Contrast to languages where there isn't a spec, or the spec is the interpreter, such as Perl 5 (Perl 6 actually has a specification and multiple implementations or various levels of conformance), or things in between, such as Python with the Python Language Reference. There are benefits and drawbacks to a standard/specification. One benefit is that it's easy for someone to start their own implementation and test for conformance and have a high degree of surety whether it will work with existing programs. One downside is that when there's a problem found in the spec, it often requires more work to fix, as the changes need to propagate out to the implementations, which will have their own timelines as to when they can implement it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java

[hitgeek]

from what I've heard, .Net Standard 2 should be stable for a while and should fix the random missing stuff that was present in the various versions of .net standard 1.x

[malkia]

Naming is still one of the most difficult things. Then again we get used to bad names, and keep on... (For example why The JSON standard persist on calling things objects, rather than say... maps or dictionaries)...