microsoft/dotnet

This repository is a directory page for Microsoft's .NET ecosystem on GitHub. .NET is Microsoft's general-purpose software platform used to build desktop applications, web servers, mobile apps, and games. The repo itself does not contain a working product. Instead, it points readers to the many separate repositories that hold the actual code, documentation, and community resources, and it gives a starting place for people new to .NET who want to find their bearings. The README is organised as a set of curated link lists. One section covers the core engineering projects, including the main .NET runtime at dotnet/core, the cross-platform UI framework .NET MAUI, the web framework ASP.NET Core, the C# and F# language repos, Entity Framework Core for database access, ML.NET for machine learning, the Roslyn compiler, and the older Windows desktop frameworks Windows Forms and WPF. A parallel section lists the documentation repositories that match each of those products. There are smaller sections for .NET Framework, which is the older Windows-only version of the platform, and for Xamarin, the toolkit for building iOS, Android, and macOS apps in C# that has now mostly merged into .NET MAUI. The page also links to a short list of well known community projects such as Orleans, MonoGame, ReactiveUI, MVVM Cross, JSON.NET, and Exceptionless, and points to community-maintained awesome-list repos for further browsing. A final section explains the .NET Foundation, the independent organisation that hosts many of these open source projects. It links to the Foundation's project list, its Discord server, and an invitation to join. The repository also includes a few local Markdown files inside the repo: release notes and documentation for the older .NET Framework, lists of open source developer and consumer projects, and a page about free services and tools that open source .NET projects can apply to use. The maintainers note that this repo is not an official support channel for .NET itself. Bug reports and product questions should go to the individual product repositories that this page links to. The code in the repository is licensed under the MIT license.