With a post on Microsoft DevBlog, Redmond giant clarified the situation around .NET Framework, its relationship with .NET Core and it announced that  .NET Framework 4.8 the last version of the .NET Framework  that Microsoft will ship. After the release of .NET Core 3 the next major version will be .NET Core 5 which Microsoft wants to be the version of .NET that developers must be using after .NET Core 3.

Microsoft also confirmed a few interesting details as for example that it will skip .NET Core 4 to avoid confusion so the next major version of .NET (any platform) has been called .NET Core 5 to allow developers using the .NET Framework to be familiar with the new numbering. Also a few technologies that used to be very popular will not be ported to the next .NET version and, while they will be serviced (for how long ? Microsoft is starting to not to honor its old habit of ten-years-long support for deprecated technologies…), developers should start thinking about converting their applications. Technologies like  WebForms, WCF and Windows Worflow will not be ported , all of them being very popular technologies in the Windows Server space.

The shipment date for .NET Core 3 will be September 2019, which makes the next major release of .NET Core (currenty at preview5 stage) very close.