What's the difference between SDK and Runtime in .NET Core?

sdk .net-core runtime
mohammad rostami siahgeli picture mohammad rostami siahgeli · Dec 9, 2017 · Viewed 36.1k times · Source

I've read many articles, including this one, yet I can't still figure out what's the difference, and they have not explained it either in simple terms or at all.

Can someone please clarify what's the difference between .NET SDK and .NET Runtime?

Update: Using comparisons would be very appreciated. Analogy alongside simple English is highly educational.

Answer

OrdinaryOrange picture OrdinaryOrange · Apr 7, 2018

According to the .Net Core Guide, .NET Core is composed of the following items

  • A .NET runtime, which provides a type system, assembly loading, a garbage collector, native interop and other basic services.
  • A set of framework libraries, which provide primitive data types, app composition types and fundamental utilities.
  • A set of SDK tools and language compilers that enable the base developer experience, available in the .NET Core SDK.
  • The 'dotnet' app host, which is used to launch .NET Core apps. It selects the runtime and hosts the runtime, provides an assembly loading policy and launches the app. The same host is also used to launch SDK tools in much the same way.

The SDK is all of the stuff that is needed/makes developing a .NET Core application easier, such as the CLI and a compiler.

The runtime is the "virtual machine" that hosts/runs the application and abstracts all the interaction with the base operating system.

Only the latter is required to run the application, but the former is needed to develop the application.

Related questions

Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 2.1.1 upgrade "Blocked by project"

I'm trying to upgrade a .net core 2.1 project to the latest version of Nuget packages such as Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.Abstractions 2.1.1. However this is blocked by the package reference Microsoft.NETCore.App, when I try to upgrade the "meta" package …

Read More
The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 2.1.3

I want to make sure that my application is built against .NET Core 2.1.3, so I installed version 2.1.401 of the SDK and set the TargetFrameworkVersion of the project to 2.1.3. This gives me the following error message (emphasis mine): C:\Program Files\…

Read More
Changing API level Android Studio

I want to change the minimum SDK version in Android Studio from API 12 to API 14. I have tried changing it in the manifest file, i.e., <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="14" android:targetSdkVersion="18" /> and rebuilding the project, but I still …

Read More