❔ .NET VS .NET SDK
Hello guys, I'm starting learning C# and I'm having problems understanding the difference between .NET ( which has the runtime ) and .NET SDK. It says that it is a platform for developer that has all sort of tools. But I want to understand exactly what the hell it is. I come from a web development background.
6 Replies
This is maybe a poor analogy, but if you consider old-school console gaming, the program would be a game, and the runtime would be your PS2. You can run a game on your Playstation, but to actually create a PS2 game, gaming studios needed special hardware (development kits) from Sony.
Similarly, in order to run compiled C# software, you only need the runtime, but to create programs, you need a compiler, analyzers, and other tooling. In the case of .NET and most (every?) framework/langauge, the SDK includes the runtime as well as these additional features.
First of all, i love this analogy o.o. And thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question! 🤍
Now, if the SDK includes the runtime as well, we can download only that from Microsoft right? If we want to only run app.
In case we want all the tools for developing an app, we need the SDK.
Yeah, so in summary, a developer's workstation would just need to install the SDK, while your docker container or web server would need to have the runtime installed
To be more precise, you can do without a runtime. You can package it with your app, by creating a release in self-contained mode
Guys thank you so much. It was very helpful. 🥹
Was this issue resolved? If so, run
/close - otherwise I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.