.NET Core is a free, open-source, modular, cross-platform framework developed by Microsoft for building modern, high-performance applications. It is a new version of .NET Framework and is a cross-platform successor to it. .NET Core includes a runtime, a set of libraries, and a development environment that supports multiple programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, and F#. It is designed to run on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. .NET Core is written from scratch to make it modular, lightweight, fast, and cross-platform. It is released under an MIT License. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft employees by way of the .NET Foundation. .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library. It can be used to build different types of applications such as mobile, desktop, web, cloud, IoT, machine learning, microservices, game, etc.. The latest version of .NET Core is .NET 6, which was released on November 8, 2021.