Cross Platform Development Platform

A free, open-source, cross-platform development platform for building web, mobile, desktop, microservices, machine learning, cloud, and gaming applications, maintained by Microsoft with over 474,000 GitHub stars across the ecosystem and 390,000 packages available on NuGet. The runtime executes on Windows, Linux, and macOS with consistent behavior and performance across all platforms, enabling true write-once-run-anywhere deployment without recompilation. The platform supports multiple programming languages including C# with advanced features like records, pattern matching, and nullable reference types, F# for functional-first programming with type providers, and Visual Basic for rapid application development. Performance benchmarks demonstrate significant advantages, with ASP.NET Core serving over 340,000 HTTP responses per second in TechEmpower benchmarks compared to approximately 34,000 for Node.js alternatives, a tenfold throughput advantage. The Just-In-Time compiler optimizes code at runtime based on actual execution patterns, while Ahead-Of-Time compilation through Native AOT produces self-contained single-file executables with startup times under 50 milliseconds for microservices. Entity Framework Core provides an object-relational mapper supporting SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and in-memory databases with LINQ queries, migrations, and change tracking. ASP.NET Core enables building web APIs, real-time applications with SignalR, minimal APIs, and gRPC services. MAUI provides cross-platform native UI for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows from a single codebase. The ecosystem includes tools for cloud-native deployment with Docker and Kubernetes support, machine learning with ML.NET, and game development through Unity integration.