Datalogics Inc. is very proud to announce the brand new .NET Core support for the Adobe PDF Library. The Adobe PDF library is the most powerful PDF SDK on the market, and now that power is unlocked on the .NET Core development platform.

First, what is .NET? It’s a development platform developed by Microsoft that runs on Windows and was a closed source solution released in 2002. The most popular language used for .NET development is C#, so much so it’s become synonymous with .NET and the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) itself. It includes things like Windows Forms Applications, Console Applications, Class Libraries, ASP.NET, WPF, and WCF. Today .NET remains extremely popular on Windows.

Mono was an unofficial attempt to get the .NET framework to work on the Linux and Mac platforms. It was controversial and not well received by Enterprise users.

So, what’s .NET Core? It’s the next generation of the .NET development platform. It’s the successor to the .NET Framework and is open-source. The biggest thing about .NET Core is it works on Linux and Mac, so it allows cross-platform development using a .NET language, like C# for example. It includes support for things like Windows Forms Applications, Console applications, Class Libraries, ASP.NET, and WPF.

With the release of .NET Core v1.0 from Microsoft, there was lukewarm interest from the development community, because there were gaps in the APIs and performance was considered slow. Since the release of v2.0 and v3.0 those gaps are mostly filled, and performance is improved. There has since been a lot of interest from the development community and from commercial users.

For the first time, using .NET is now an option for Linux and Mac for Enterprise users, supported by Microsoft. Today’s users want to write cross-platform code using .NET or will be migrating existing Windows applications to be cross-platform in the near future.

We are now shipping a .NET Core Class Library that targets v3.1 of the .NET Core, which is the latest and greatest version. This will allow users to develop their .NET application on Linux and know it’s going to work on Windows or Mac. Similarly, it allows users to write their application on Mac and know it’s going to work on Linux or Windows and finally that they can write their application on Windows and know it’s going to work on Mac or Linux. Users can now leverage the mature, time-tested functionality of Adobe PDF Library using the simplicity of the .NET interface in one application that works on Windows, Linux, or Mac.

The .NET Core Library ships with new .NET Core sample applications and new documentation. If you’d like to get started with the Adobe PDF Library using .NET Core click here.