.NET is a general purpose development platform maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub. It is cross-platform, supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, and can be used in device, cloud, and embedded/IoT scenarios.
.NET has several capabilities that make development productive, including automatic memory management, (runtime) generic types, reflection, asynchronous constructs, concurrency, and native interop. Millions of developers take advantage of these capabilities to efficiently build high-quality applications.
You can use C# or F# to write .NET apps.
.NET is open source (MIT and Apache 2 licenses) and was contributed to the .NET Foundation by Microsoft in 2014. It can be freely adopted by individuals and companies, including for personal, academic or commercial purposes. Multiple companies use .NET as part of apps, tools, new platforms and hosting services.
You are invited to contribute new features, fixes, or updates, large or small; we are always thrilled to receive pull requests, and do our best to process them as fast as we can.
Watch discussions for Docker-related .NET announcements.
The .NET Docker samples show various ways to use .NET and Docker together. See Building Docker Images for .NET Applications to learn more.
You can quickly run a container with a pre-built .NET Docker image, based on the .NET console sample.
Type the following command to run a sample console application:
docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/samplesYou can quickly run a container with a pre-built .NET Docker image, based on the ASP.NET Core sample.
Type the following command to run a sample web application:
docker run -it --rm -p 8000:8080 --name aspnetcore_sample mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/samples:aspnetappAfter the application starts, navigate to http://localhost:8000 in your web browser. You can also view the ASP.NET Core site running in the container from another machine with a local IP address such as http://192.168.1.18:8000.
Note: ASP.NET Core apps (in official images) listen to port 8080 by default, starting with .NET 8. The
-pargument in these examples maps host port8000to container port8080(host:containermapping). The container will not be accessible without this mapping. ASP.NET Core can be configured to listen on a different or additional port.
See Hosting ASP.NET Core Images with Docker over HTTPS to use HTTPS with this image.
.NET container images have several variants that offer different combinations of flexibility and deployment size. The Image Variants documentation contains a summary of the image variants and their use-cases.
.NET "distroless" container images contain only the minimal set of packages .NET needs, with everything else removed. Due to their limited set of packages, distroless containers have a minimized security attack surface, smaller deployment sizes, and faster start-up time compared to their non-distroless counterparts. They contain the following features:
.NET offers distroless images for Azure Linux and Ubuntu (Chiseled).
.NET:
.NET Framework:
.NET container images are regularly monitored for the presence of CVEs. A given image will be rebuilt to pick up fixes for a CVE when:
Please refer to the Security Policy and Container Vulnerability Workflow for more detail about what to do when a CVE is encountered in a .NET image.